If you’ve ever seen geographically sensitive advertising telling you “Sexy women in your area want to meet now!” and wondered if dating sites have the balls/lack of conviction/stupidity to just paste in pictures of models and pretend they’re customers this ad, served to me recently, is proof they do.
Sydney Moon, San Francisco’s finest, is not only not looking for dates, but is the kind of woman who’d pull off your head and shit into your neck if you were to question the validity of her degree (don’t ask me how I know).
February 6th, 2008 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: February 8th, 2008
‘Kyla, what is best in life?’ ‘To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!’
Getting Kyla Cole to do your bidding is now possible without knowledge of her whereabouts and bondian reserves of charm , her avatar’s the star of “GODS: Lands of Infinity, Special Edition”. As games which sound like bands you’d never listen to it seems pretty standard. Monsters, swords, wizards etc. A reviewer describes it thus:
“GODS: Lands of Infinity follows the story of a hot chick that was once a god, but now has lost her powers and must start over from the beginning.”
Hot chicks have always had a god-like ability to bend me to their will. I don’t know why she needs any other powers. It must be harder to be hot from within a suit of armor.
Kyla Cole
I stand corrected. It’s hard to be hot in armor unless you leave the trousers at home and set the ensemble off with heels.
Kyla talks about the game here. Don’t watch it unless you’ve got time to Google Zuzana Tutterova. My god what is it with Slovak women…?
The full game’s available for download and there’s a free demo online too.
October 24th, 2007 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: February 1st, 2008
“Vood you vant to buy an auto from me?”
Eva Padburg sells a car.
Mercedes have employed Eva Padberg in an attempt to add sex-appeal to their cars. Based on a quick analysis of her work in Playboy I’m thinking mission accomplished.
Eva Padberg thinking about seatbelt pre-tensioners.
Eva Padberg can’t find her keys.
Google Eva until you understand why Mercedes have made the right decision.
For their most popular models they’ve posted audio clips, which provide a rare chance to hear what models like… for instance… Kyla Cole – actually sound like.
Mystique Magazine is a high-budget website devoted to softcore poses of well known models in exotic locales. Their model of the year, decided by online vote, wins a shoot in a glamorous location which, as it’s basically a paid holiday, makes them very popular with talent. In efforts to win the prize many models send Mystique as much traffic as they can.
In the past they’ve been operated in the Playboy mold, apparent in their determination to label what’s basically a web operation as a magazine, but as Playboy fades in profitability they’ve decided to change their approach. While Mystique, like Playboy, used to lock its content away and try to bully browsers into buying, the most successful new adult sites give away a lot of content and hope to persuaded people to join after getting a chance to experience what’s on offer – Kisses and Candlesticks. It works and recognizing this Mystique have ‘borrowed’ a lot of ideas and re-launched with an emphasis on making free content easy to find.
The best thing about their new site is, unsurprisingly, their sole prominent innovation. For their most popular models they’ve posted audio clips, which provide a rare chance to hear what models like… for instance… Kyla Cole – actually sound like.
Most of their ‘Top Rated Models‘ (just below mid right of page) have audio. As usually these women are only heard pretending to orgasm or reading a script there’s something exciting about just listening to them talk. You feel as if you’re getting to know them in the way you do eavesdropping on strangers at a restaurant. I’m sure there are more but Katia Corriveau, Linda O’Neil, Aria Giovanni, Jennifer Korbin, Divini Rae, Zdenka Podkapova, Rebecca DiPietro, Amiee Rickards and Erica Campbell can all be heard right now and I think they’d be smart to post longer, more podcastable, audio.
Unfortunately in their rush to ape the competition Mystique have started a megapixel race with their competitors. For years Peter “Mr. Luba” Hegre has been advertising images at up to 6000px and Mystique are now posting shots at 3000px (a quarter of Hegre’s size).
The problem is, while Hegre shoots with Medium Format digital back which takes ultra-high resolution 39 megapixel stills, Mystique appear to have simply blown their old content up. E.g. here’s a 100% crop of “Ira Shakira” from Hegre. You can see it’s in focus and shows a wealth of real detail:
100% crop of Ira Sahkira at 3000 pixels courtesy Hegre Art
As opposed to this from Mystique which is clearly an enlargement/expansion of a smaller file.
100% crop of Kyla Cole at 3000 pixels courtesy Mystique.
There’s no real detail and claiming this is a ‘high resolution’ image is a lie (you can also see the difference in color correction. Kyla’s image is ten shades of brown). If Mystique do have real high-resolution images on the site it’s madness to mix them with enlargements like this which will only upset users and undermine their credibility.
If Mystique give me access to the site I’ll come back with a fuller review and any necessary corrections. For now I’d say enjoy their new library of free material, check out the audio clips and don’t believe the hype. Their content is sadly still no richer than the rapidly aging 800-1000px industry standard.
Why spending too much on a domain might be a smart thing to do.
May 18th, 2007 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 12th, 2007
Porn.com has just sold for $9 million, $5 million less than Sex.com took during a similar sale in January 2006.
That’s a bargain as porn.com is the better domain.
While sex.com gets more type-in traffic than porn.com, ’sex’ is a keyword used for all manner of searches whereas people searching for ‘porn’ are highly likely to be in the right target audience for adult websites. Unless there’s a better way to monetize an adult domain that pornography, the domains which draw the best qualified porn traffic are those with the most value. Ergo, porn trumps sex.
Porn.com’s new owners have said they’re in no rush and are waiting to come up with a strong idea for the site. The idea they should be exploring is screamingly obvious, they need to build a content site. The alternative, using Porn.com to push traffic to other people’s sites, guarantees they’ll make less in the long term as even if they’re paid 50% of revenue, by choosing not to build a content library they’ll have no assets to exploit in future or other media.
Their real dilemma should be deciding what kind of pay-site to build and I’d hope they don’t make the mistake of producing just another me-too subscription destination. Announcing a desire to become an ‘adult portal’ (how quaint, portals are so 1999.) doesn’t seem very smart but hey, who said spending $9M had to make you cautious?
As traditional adult models make less and less thanks to competition and web-models (torrents, social networking) which didn’t exist in the late nineties, it’ll be interesting to see how such significant investments are turned to profit.
(N.B. Don’t you wish you’d been a little geekier in 1994 and bought some of those primo domains yourself?)
May 14th, 2007 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 12th, 2007
…even in 2007 few people understand what an artist with the ability to do more than crop, paste and colorize can do if asked.
The most beautiful models – the really famous ones – are intimidatingly flawless genetic exceptions as atypical as Stephen Hawking and Michael Jordan but in far less inspiring ways. For the rest of us trolls there’s Photoshop and even in 2007 few people understand what an artist with the ability to do more than crop, paste and colorize can do if asked.
Normally changes tend towards the subtle but because it’s easiest to start as close to your intended result as possible. If you have the skill, the inclination and the armagnac (the secret of all great creative personalities) but not the models to match, you can remake people Steve Austin style as this video shows.
Hence the ’she looks like what?’ faces you see at porn conventions and the make-up artists who travel with most major celebrities. Depressing until you realise it vaults the person you’re diddling into the ranks of world-class poon.
April 26th, 2007 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 9th, 2007
I love Fleshbot and though I couldn’t do what they so (I’ve tried and it’s harder than it looks), but I can write copy. (When I’ve been paid to pay attention, which I haven’t regarding any error-ridden, run-on rubbish you might find here. My standards are so good I’ve got two of them.)
As an ex-copywriter I’m pretty attentive to the style of what I read, so it’s with some surprise I found myself only noticing Fleshbot’s horrendous tagline earlier today.
“Fleshbot is a frequently updated and influential web magazine about the pornography–and the sex culture–that digital technology and distribution has made possible.”
Jesus.
Where to begin? Assuming they like what their copy says, there are a grip of easy improvements.
Firstly who’s grandmother did the typing? Using double-dashes to simulate em dashes is a hack invented in the days of monospaced typewriters. It’s not been relevant to computers for twenty years and looks retarded. It’s one of the problems caused by the fondness American schools have for teaching typing (we don’t in Europe). The outmoded ludicrous people doing the teaching pass on their outmoded, and nowdays ludicrous, habits and pollute the world with people who think they’re still supposed to put two spaces after a period as if it were 1950. In a business letter the double dashes would only be annoying and weird, in a tagline they can’t be excused.
Onto grammar. Though it makes sense – barely – if read twice, on first reading ‘…an influential web magazine about the pornography…’ sounds like something Borat would say. Also, when was the last time anyone, or thing, influential had to label themselves so grandiosely? The influential President of the United States? The influential CEO of Microsoft? It’s embarrassing.
I could argue the term ‘web magazine’ is a bloated $20 way of saying blog, but could just as easily point out how many people still don’t know what a blog is. I’d win this argument with myself by explaining that Fleshbot readers are likely to know what blogs are given their age, web use and fondness for RSS, but I’m tired and not getting paid for this so fuck arguing with myself. I know I’m going to win regardless.
Finally, listing both digital technology and distribution reads like another attempt to sound impressive which isn’t required. Digital distribution technology is… er… technology and taglines should be tight. The point’s well made without mentioning distribution and no one’s going to be surprised by the website’s digital focus.
Our newly beaten into shape tagline reads:
“Fleshbot is a frequently updated web magazine about pornography and the sex culture digital technology has made possible.”
A clear improvement (Gawker dudes, you’re welcome).
Fleshbot’s just about the biggest sex-blog online. Let’s not have our champions embarrass us.
“any domain whose name, content or advertising is lewd, graphic, or profane,”
Google have given adult webmasters until May 31st to remove such domains from the program.
Adsense for Domains has many fans in porn. Despite Google veiling the percentage of profits passed to sites promoting their advertisers, they provide better targeting, more honest reporting, and bigger checks than thousands of corrupt adult affiliate programs who seem to promise more.
The downside to Google’s efficiency has been their tacit promotion of domain speculation. Buying domains is cheap and placing ads on them costs nothing, allowing speculators to buy thousands of URI’s, fill them with ads and then sell the ones which don’t meet profit targets. It’s keeps good domains out of the hands of people trying to build sites and floods the web with advertising circle-jerks which encompass some of the most potent domains and sullies the reputation of digital pornographers. It’s a problem in the mainstream too.
Google’s decision won’t impact the speculators for long, but will likely result in similar bans at smaller ad networks and for ad types beyond those focused on domains. The days of porn sites being able to participate in mass-market advertising programs may be drawing to a close.
March 1st, 2007 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 5th, 2007
Ron Jeremy is a really nice guy but you don’t tend to associate his name with good taste. Good tastebuds maybe, the guy does to buffets what Halliburton does to no-bid contracts (Zing!), but he’s the last person you’d expect to find in the celebrity homes issue of Wallpaper.
When I found this T-Shirt (pictured) in a store today I was taken aback. It’s actually pretty nicely designed. I’d almost wear it. ‘The Hedgehog’ looks good as a South Park/minifig chimera. Who’da thunk it?
As I wasn’t about to drop £20 ($4,000,000) on a T-shirt simply so I could blog about it, I instead committed the manufacturer’s website to memory and walked home, to discover I’d lost it somewhere between the parts of my brain dedicated to ‘breasts’ and ‘ninjas’ – forcing me to spend the next hour Googling for a picture of the thing.
Did you know 50% of world manufacturing is dedicated to producing T-shirts carrying the image of Bill Clinton’s favorite Jew?
February 23rd, 2007 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 4th, 2007
You can’t accuse me of pretending to be be an expert in areas I don’t know. Hand to hand combat and the orgasmic techniques of the ancient Mayans, yes. Thumbnail Gallery Posts… not so much.
This wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t own TGP.com. It’s a serious URL and a possession which puts me in a position where each week I have to email someone and say no, $25,000 isn’t an offer I’m interested in, even though it should be when the URL isn’t making me that much a year and should be making more each week. Despite never becoming expert in the field of ‘giving shit away’ I’ve had enough experience on most sides of the adult business to feel confident I could make the site a success. The problem’s the model.
At TGP’s people upload links to free photos which are shared with visitors after a little filtering. The money comes from ads and for a TGP owner the more creatively they can be rammed down a surfers gaping maw the better. Lucre which has lead to the proliferation of pop-overs, pop-unders, flash-floaters and the other annoying IN YOUR FACE techniques the jizz-bizz is famous for. It’s a very dirty, and highly profitable, business.
I’ve always been reluctant to fall into this trap, determined to run TGP without resorting to scumbag webmaster techniques. There are good guys in every part of the adult business, I’ve met them. I’ve made it my mission to be that guy in TGP because like female baldness, it can work beautifully even if it’s a little unusual.
So I’ve tried to run a traditional TGP with no scummy ads (result – tons of crappy traffic and no real profit), as a blog with few TGP elements (result – high quality traffic and absolutely no profit) and most recently as a web 2.0 style TGP/Digg hybrid (result – total confusion and almost no profit).
It’s frustrating because the site as it exists today should be a blockbuster. Content is uploaded directly by users and voted on by anyone who comes to the site. The best stuff makes the homepage and the spam gets deleted. It’s Digg meets fapp(ing), a genius and much copied idea (I copied it too so that’s okay), and about as popular among webmasters as leaving a World of Warcraft all-nighter to take a Pilates classs.
As a marketing guru it’s my job to know why things work and more importantly, why they don’t. In this case I’m lost. Sure the TGP design might be crappy and the technology imperfect but have you seen this? It’s ugly as sin and makes seven figures a month. Ugly is not a problem (or this? It’s ugly as sin and makes seven figures a month.)
So I’d like to hear from people who know about this TGP niche and want in on TGP.com. I’m going back to school (start your mental training montage). I wanna be a contender. Sure I’m older than normal but I still got some stuff in the basement. I’ve got too much on my plate to start from scratch so we’re going to have to make a splash, rely on some blunt force trauma. I wanna build some hurtin’ bombs.
Teach me, take my money, tell me what to do. Make me your bitch. It’ll give me something to blog about, and give you a share in TGP.com (a version of which is making the silly money it should be, not the beer money it is). Hell I’ll even through in marketing/PR advice and handjobs if it’ll help (to clarify that’s handjobs for women – women with… er… cocks. Guys, you just get oral).
Otherwise I’m going to shave off my hair and check into reTGPhab (that was bad, but the comedy union said I had to or they’d kick me out). Talk to me.
Never making the frontpage of Digg is so statistically unlikely there's probably something to learn.
February 7th, 2007 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 4th, 2007
SugarBank’s the proud member of an elite cadre of blogs which has never made the front page of Digg.
It might sound silly, but in which only 123 blogs have more than one reader and aren’t just lists of links to other blogs, being able to write articles picked up by Wired and BoingBoing without getting Dugg is some feat. Even the recent addition of ‘Share This’ links at the bottom of my posts hasn’t broken my perfect record of unwanted isolation.
This isn’t bad luck, it’s skill.
I’m not bothered because I ride alone know why. If you want to join the un-Diggable club the following secrets of my success will help. If you’d rather get popular (how gauche…) doing the opposite might bring you the attention you crave.
Post Naughty Pictures
This is the easiest way to keep the diggs down. Any hint of sexuality seems to expose a common prejudice which equates sexy with stupid. People are so afraid of being associated with adult material they’re reluctant even to vote for it.
Additionally, as sexy images make a page not-safe-for-work, posting them greatly reduces the chances of click-through from sites who label you as such.
Swear
Fucking silly if you ask me, but writing like Hemmingway (is my ego showing?) isn’t seen as a plus among the geeks who control the internet. Confusingly ejaculations of ‘fudge!’ and ‘$#!@!’ don’t seem to bother people old enough to read though such childish obfuscation.
Advertise
Plastering a blog with ads can make it look tacky, but the real turn-off for social networkers is a too clearly expressed interest in making money. Successful Digg exploiters often place ads on their pages only after they’ve caught the public’s imagination. This doesn’t seem to hurt because sneakiness is rewarded.
Write Original Copy
Writing original copy will not get you noticed. Web users respond to words the same way online as they do off and, despite vocally decrying all forms of spam, spamy sounding copy of the “10 ways to…!”, “Secrets of successful…!” and “What they never told you about…!” ilk is precisely what most people notice and share.
A fantastic article capped by a title better suited to The New Yorker than Skymall won’t get seen. A generic list of truisms headed “10 Hidden Daily Show Futurama References” will earn you the cock-snot crown in fanboy heaven.
Challenge Convention
Diggers love controversial content but strong opinions polarize, effectively halving the number of people who will vote for you. If you want to say something bold it’s best to find someone else who’s said it already and link to them. Then you become the hub of the debate, not the representative of one side of it.
Just in case you’re thinking you can call my bluff and get this dugg, here’s a link to some rather lovely midget porn (I can’t lie, I’d hit all 3′10″ and 78 lbs of Bridget) which should guarantee I maintain my unbroken streak. Don’t pretend you’re not going to click it, midgetdwarfpixiemunchkingoblinsmall personarmy men midget porn’s universal.
January 18th, 2007 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 4th, 2007
One of the least publicized aspects of the Adult Entertainment Expo was a live domain auction, in conjunction with Moniker. The results are in and I’m surprised.
I fully expected to write a piece explaining that domains are worth less than marketing and the days of big-money for URL’s was over.
I was wrong. Crap like ‘Clitoralpumps.com’ (they make those!?) made $600 and surreal-bad-sex-nightmare domain ‘Emergencyclinic.com’ went for $11,000.
The real shock was at the top end of the spectrum. Nine domains made over $50,000 and four broke the $100,000 mark. Amazing in a market where every professional I know would say that the idea’s more important than the name. You live and learn…
The big social bookmarking sites are getting spammy.
January 11th, 2007 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 4th, 2007
Del.icio.us, the spike heeled bitch-mother of social bookmarking sites, is by virtue of its construction, naturally resistant to spam. Anyone reading its RSS feeds can be sure they’re seeing a reasonable snapshot of what’s grabbing the attention of blog readers making it a uniquely valuable source of metadata.
Taking an educated guess at the size of the online adult market.
January 8th, 2007 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 4th, 2007
The debateaboutrevenues in the adult industry is everywhere and Christ-on-a-dildo is it wrong. Too many smart people with too little experience of major adult websites are dismissing the value of the internet.
Newspaper hacks can’t do much better. Websites, as private concerns, don’t publish books and are thus impervious to journalist driven forensic accounting. Given the big companies aversion to being investigated by the tax authorities (though I’ve watched it happen to zero effect – my porn guys are the good guys) the only people able to honestly discuss the income of the web-industry are insiders who’ve seen the books and even one of those isn’t enough.
To asses the web business you have to know about the workings of more than one company, and the only people fitting that description have been inside the handful of billing companies which handle transaction processing for the big websites. Your ideal informant has worked within a major billing company and has had board level access to companies on every side of the online adult industry, content sites, TGP and video-chat.
That’d be me then.
Forbes are quoting Playboy (which is like interviewing Huell Howser for a piece on ‘The best paid people on TV’) and everyone else has assumed the video retail industry is the bulk of modern porn because they don’t know any better. I do. As someone who’s seen the subscriber and revenue numbers for more of the major adult companies than any-one else writing on the subject, I can tell you that there are billions missing from the current debate.
Allow me to break it down:
The average tier-1 adult website charges $20 a month and has 20-40K subscribers. That’s $400k a month per site, or $4.8M a year, and a conservative estimate puts the number of sites on that level world wide at 100. That’s $500M a year of business without looking at the talented amateurs, the top tier of whom are also clearing $1M per anum and who number in the hundreds.
Video-chat sites (iFriends, IMLive, CamContacts, LiveJasmin etc) charge an average of $1.50 a minute and the biggest players have an an average total take of about $150 a minute. That’s $216K a day which, even when split 50/50 with chat-hosts and minus running costs provide $100K a day, or $3M a month (yes, there are the costs of running an affiliate program to factor in, but I’m being conservative in my other assumptions and accounting for that expense by underestimating in other areas. E.g. Most companies don’t split 50/50 with chathosts, and 100 active conversations at $1.50 a minute is less than the big guys are averaging – most of them handling fewer chats but at significantly greater average revenue). There are roughly 10 sites of that size and, though the drop-off is sharp, the top 3 are all making over $100M a year and the #1 player is bringing in well over $300M. These figures are not guesses and the top 10 live video-chat sites thus represent over $1B in revenue.
More philosophically, can our definition of ‘porn’ remain rational while including Playboy and excluding Nuts and Loaded, while all three publish identical photos with identical intentions. If porn is defined by content, not the press releases put out by fearful publishers, we should include everything that’s designed as sexual entertainment and include NN (nearly nude) sites too (tell me this nudity-free site isn’t porn). ‘Demi-porn’ is a growing sector which isn’t being counted by anyone but which can only be left out of industry discussions using the same blinkers the video guys use to ignore the web.
Jenna Jameson doesn’t make as much hard-cash as some of the biggest amateurs in Canada and she’s at the top of the performer tree (though she performs so little it’s get-ting hard to put her in that category). Though the average porn-performer makes more than the average adult webmaster, there are just a few hundred working adult performers on the planet, there are tens of thousands of webmasters. Sites you’ve never heard of are making $1M a month and many more in the $10-$100K range operate completely under the radar. No one who understands the difference between gross and net would rather own Vivid Pictures than The Hun because in porn a sole-trader with a PC and a basement can easily out-perform a corporation with product in every adult store in America.
Yes, the porn industry’s smaller than the $10-12B so often bandied about and enthusiastically swatted down, but video, TV and cable are just the public face of a very private enterprise. The global internet business is worth billions, even if estimates are limited to the conservative back-of-the-envelope sketches presented here. Factoring in the long-tail and demi-porn you’d have to double those estimates. Suddenly those ridiculous numbers don’t look as off as some are suggesting – and the web looks a hell of a lot bigger than the video market. Amazingly, in 2006, this seems to be news.
January 1st, 2007 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 4th, 2007
Taylor Lane Typography (who probably didn’t inspire Taylor Rain to choose her moniker – but let’s not underestimate her, it’s possible) produced a calendar in 2005 which combined type, sex and cleverness to increase turnover by 25%
Sex + Clever sells. Who’s going to tell the pornographers?
“Perhaps you’re a man who grabs life by the cuff. You live life your way. And it shows…in the clothes you wear…in the women you love…and in the car you drive The Subaru GL Coupe is waiting for you. Sleek. Agile. The sculptured lines of the one piece body invite you in. With front wheel drive she’s different. A step ahead of the others. Go to her. Let her cradle you in the softness of her highback reclining bucket seats. Surround yourself with the lushness of her interior appointments. The GL Coupe is ready. Now. Turn her on. Lead her to the open road. This is where the Subaru GL Coupe wants to be. Unleash the relentless power of her 1400cc quadrozontal engine. Control the Coupe’s every movement — her every twist and turn — as you take hold of her rack and pinion steering. She’ll make it smooth with her four wheel independent suspension. She’ll carry you away as she peaks to the red line of her tach. The Subaru GL Coupe is yours. Waiting for you. And one more good thing, she costs so little to keep happy.”
While many wonder about the manner in which porn’s marketed, and it’s assumptions about how we perceive women, it’s worth remembering that in 1973 ‘women taming’ wasn’t even considered funny.
December 21st, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 19th, 2007
I don’t play poker but I do like cards. If anyone has £10 to spend and the desire to make me happy, invest in this new set of playing cards by Lascivious, Londons hip panty manufacturer, featuring design and illustration from some of the UK’s finest new talent (with special props to David Foldvari of ‘we-went-to-school-together’ fame).
The illustrations are pan-sexual and range from tame to ‘wood’. They’re universally beautiful and doubtless this deck will become collectible. At £3 for an unboxed set they’re cheap to the point of stupidity. I’ve already invented an interesting twist on snap involving this deck and a willing partner but, I’m deviant so what did you expect?
“…companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.
Word-of-mouth marketing can take any form of peer-to-peer communication, such as a post on a Web blog, a MySpace.com page for a movie character, or the comments of a stranger on a bus.”
That means making an official statement about any link on your website or blog which you can get paid for.
This isn’t new law, just a clarification of the law as it stands. It means tactics to make ads look like content could be illegal in the US. Review sites, ‘friends’ lists and ‘advice’ will all need to be labeled as advertising.
Interesting times…
DISCLOSURE: This post was brought to you by the Federal Trade Commission
December 12th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 3rd, 2007
Some of you may have noticed that the latest trend in adult industry copying is copying Digg. The idea is that instead of posting lists of links to photo galleries as pioneered by the original Thumbnail Gallery Posts, visitors submit links to galleries themselves and then edit the submissions by voting on what they like most.
This is a shitty idea.
The jizz-bizz is know for ethics that’d make a politician blush and one of the biggest problems faced by all TGP’s is fraudulent links. Webmasters love to bait-and-switch, re-routing links in order to steer users to suit their ends. Pop-ups are another well known problem and to maintain the quality of their sites TGP owners spend hours screening links.
User submitted content will have to be screened by readers. While at Digg that’s an editorial process, for a porn site most of the editing will involve trawling through spam, pop-up graveyards and images that would make a butcher puke.
So we’ve tried to be a little smarter at TGP.
TGP – which now stands for ‘Team Gallery Post’ – takes the user submitted content idea and voting but skirts the problems that causes by hosting the content in a central location. That means you don’t have to worry about clicking links that take you to the wrong place and you don’t have to worry about pop-ups.
As a webmaster, model, exhibitionist, publisher or blogger exploiting TGP simply requires you to upload your photos and information. You don’t have to build webpages and you don’t need an affiliate program to promote your stuff (or yourself all you camera-phone exhibitionists). If your content’s popular you’ll win lots of votes and get promoted to our frontpage and RSS feed. The cover of Time is then just decades away. Use it for fun, business, or as a way of making money. Affiliate links are no problem and thus you can get paid cash for converting users sent directly from TGP’s pages.
The only thing TGP is missing right now is submissions. We’re in beta – which means some stuff is going to break, and we need a few brave and patient pioneers to use the site and break it some more. I don’t want to shout too loudly until we’ve had a few days to see what happens. Hence this personal invitation to try our new stuff out for yourself. Upload, vote, and comment away. There are only a few hundred thousand people watching. Interested?
November 27th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 3rd, 2007
A few days ago the devil children over at SEOBlackHat.com notified me of a new kind of Google-dance. Normally the #1 search engine targets the latest exploits when it reorganizes its index, causing webmasters to sweat and wait to see if their pages will rise or fall in the new order. This time Google took a far larger step – removing explicit sexual content from listings en masse.
The arguments for doing it in cases are strong. Most people typing ‘Sex’ into Google probably don’t want porn and Google’s in the business of giving us what we want. Converesly though people typing ‘blowjob’ into Google probably do want porn and Google’s serving no-one but the people who think Mel Gibson’s a genius (and that seven Jews control world banking) by ’sanitizing’ our smutty searches.
The effects of Google’s pogrom have been dramatic. My own website – TGP.com – moved from being the #1 result for the search term ‘TGP’ to being completely absent over the weekend and is now – curiously – back atop the results. Perhaps as my domain is my search term Google are wary of leaving FUBAR.com out of a list of to-hits for FUBAR. Perhaps they’ve worked out that no-one searches for TGP who isn’t trying to find hotdog and donut shots. Whatever the reason larger TGP’s than mine are still missing from the first page and that has to hurt.
Overall search results on sex terms are all far less porn dominated than they were a week ago while Google ads remained tied to search terms as they always were. A cynic might suggest Google was trying to make pornographers pay for decent search placement rather than getting it in return for relevancy like the rest of the universe. Do I look that cynical?
Don’t be evil? Jury’s still out…
Reeling from the changes? I’ll start talk about marketing 2007 style, i.e. without reliance on Google – later this week. In the interim, read this…
November 24th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 3rd, 2007
Last year I started a lot of projects, launched a number of blogs and made plans to launch a number of others. Many of those plans were public and to the careful observer of the Sugarverse this year might look like a failure as I repeatedly put things on hiatus, changed direction, and disappeared for weeks on end.
Here’s what happened and how it taught me to make lemonade.
My plan was to build a network of blogs, I knew blogs grew fastest when they had a lot of posts, and I was crushingly aware I didn’t have the time to write 40-50 posts a day. The answer seemed obvious. Gather a team of talented volunteers and trade shares of the profits for their time. As long as blogs with more posts have more readers, more readers mean more pageviews and more pageviews meant more revenue, a bet on a fast growing blog looked like a no brainer. I’d give up a little profit and gain a team of people I couldn’t afford to pay, united in a desire to succeed with blogs they had a stake in. Trading a few months work for a successful network was a great deal for all of us.
Did you see my mistake? I’ll give you a clue – I’m a glass half full kind of guy.
If you guessed ‘a few months work’ stop gloating and pour yourself a drink. Naively, I asked for three months to turn a profit and should have asked for 12. A wise man would have asked for 18 and an accountant a full 24. Without dollars advertising or Googlebatics you have to be prepared for the long haul when building a site. Every reader is a relationship and relationships take time. When I promised a quick return I assigned myself the increasingly difficult task of motivating people who felt mislead and let down.
Meanwhile the growth that wasn’t happening fast enough required two sets of server upgrades to manage and all my time for weeks on end. The result was a system which costs thousands to maintain and which made profit sharing even harder to achieve than the steady growth suggested.
Personally, without the blogging income I’d predicted I spent more of my time on planes having lame conversations with celebutards, international conglomerates and other people interested in my fecal veneering ability. Every time I spent less time on the network things got worse and I had to fill the gaps with other jobs.
Finally, forced to slim things to the bone after losing most of my volunteers, I put off some of my own plans (e.g. podcasting), crunched the website statistics through Excel and went to work. I had no time for niceties, and simply focused on what I could show to be effective. It wasn’t pretty but I was confident it was right.
A graph of the year is the best way to see what happened:
Going from a team of 20 to one of less than five we managed to begin a 60 day cycle of doubling traffic which continues to this day. The ’secret’ is simple enough to put into a handful of bullet points.
5 keys to rapid growth
Predict the worst - When working anyone (including yourself) find the people who’d do it for free and then tell them they’ll probably never see a dime They’ll be thrilled when you succeed, work hard until you do, and give you time to make smart mistakes.
Change your mind – Sticking to a plan which isn’t working is a bad way to run a war and a worse way to run a website. Being prepared to admit you were wrong is a big step towards being right.
Spread yourself thick - There’s only so much time you can devote to any project and the more projects you have the worse job you’ll do overall. Putting things in storage is better than letting them rot in the open air. Don’t be afraid to step back and regroup.
Be patient - YouTube happened fast, as long as you discount its founders university education and prior careers at PayPal. Steady growth isn’t anything to be ashamed of and leads to all the same places. Let things progress organically and if you can’t accelerate them, enjoy the ride – you’re moving in the right direction.
Watch your data – There are many ways to look at numbers but most people don’t get far beyond bar graphs. If you don’t look at your data in the right way you’ll miss what you should be seeing and any opportunity to learn from it. If there’s ‘nothing to see’, turn everything round and look again. Graphs with logarithmic scales are useful. Clusters on point graphs mean something. If you’re not sure where to turn you probably don’t need better data, just better ways of looking at it.
If I said I’d have predicted the last 6-8 months I’d be lying and if I said I had no regrets I’d be stupid. That said, it’s been the most interesting, most productive and most exciting year of my life. Sometimes ‘experience’ means taking your lumps and learning where you went wrong. I’m pretty experienced and learning from me is less painful than making my mistakes again. Good luck.
October 12th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 3rd, 2007
Google now owns YouTube and is the new undisputed leader in the have-you-seen-this-clip market. Way to spend $1.65B – a ludicrous amount given YouTube’s inability to make any money.
Right?
As an advertising company Google has to see appending video ads to web video as a way of eating into the massive TV advertising market. Viral videos used to be found in a range of places and websites but now are almost exclusively on YouTube (and if not are quickly mirrored there). If Google can build a system to append ads to content automatically, and they can, and devise a way of paying content owners a share of any profit made on their clips with Google wallet, they can earn back their billions fast.
With millions of downloads a day, charging advertisers fractional amounts adds up fast. By tracking the most popular and enduring content – their ‘hit shows’ – they can increase prices for clips in the way they do for keywords and all that technology and experience is already in place.
Assuming I’m right, and I think we’ll all be more comfortable if we do, in a years time every guy-sticks-knob-in-blender funny will come stuck between ads for ‘Coors Lite’ and ‘Band Aids’. For the first time it’ll make more sense to upload your funny videos to the web than send them to a cheesy TV show for a 1 in 3 chance to win $500. Really popular videos will make hundreds of thousands of dollars for their authors and instead of using the web to launch a career in TV, podcasters can enjoy a career online funded by ads they rely on GooTube to sell.
In working out a way to sell more ads, Google will have inadvertently provided the web with the micro-payment system it’s long been crying out for. With each ad impression generating a few cents for each video publisher it’s precisely the payment model best suited to digital content. The clever bit is that consumers pay nothing themselves, which increases the reach of content and with it the profits to be earned. There’s no signing-up, no exchange of personal information and no barrier to entry. Consumers get ‘free’ content, advertisers get eyeballs and performers get paid. Smart.
So where does that leave porn? The short answer is nowhere. Mainstream advertisers are not going to embrace nudity and pay for ads on trailers for ‘Island Fever 27 – Milking It’, but who said sex had to be pornographic or, perhaps more accurately, that porn had to be explicit?
There’s more than one way to skin a mushroom (think about it, I’ll wait…) and Nuts/Maxim style softcore, which which can be shared via GooTube (Yougle? It’s for sale here), will be worth worth more than hardcore material which isn’t.
Could a new golden age of sexually stimulating, non-explicit naughtiness be around the corner? If Micro-payments via ads arrive as I predict, Maxim/Nuts style demi-porn may be the future.
September 3rd, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 3rd, 2007
A few months ago, I wrote a number of posts about traffic trading which led to a Wordpress plugin called BLT. The plugin does almost everything I want it to but still doesn’t produce the kind of returns traditional adult-industry traffic-trades do and after a little Percocet and about half a bottle of Grey Goose much thought I still can’t work out why.
The most efficient machines for moving people around the internet are porn sites but their utility comes at a price. Via the diamond bladed capitalism of the jizz bizz, the easiest way to do something is always the best way to do something even when it’s clearly the wrong way to do something. Hence for pornsters, traffic-trading means redirecting links from where they’re supposed to go to where you want them to. Instead of wondering how to construct a link which lures people into visiting ‘The Star Trek Porn Blog’ (and if you want to see that, kill yourself now), you simply put up a link to something like, ‘Jessica Alba’s Well-Greased Naughty Pillows’ which you know people want to see, and send your suckers to the phaser-porn when they click through anyway.
It’s a stunt which is partly responsible for earning adult sites their deservedly bad reputation as the sinkholes of the internet.
BLT was my solution (start the awe-inspiring music now, read on in ‘Coming to a theatre near you this summer…’ voice)
BLT allows anyone to trade traffic but doesn’t redirect users without their consent. There is no ’skim’ in the traditional sense, it just display’s links from sites who send visitors and ignores those who don’t. It can display links from traders in order of the volume of visitors they send in a specific time period (as I do currently), or simply according to who most recently sent a click. In that way anyone using the plugin can be sure they’re not promoting sites which aren’t promoting them, and the people who trade most actively are rewarded with greater exposure. As only working links are displayed, you never have to worry that a traffic trader’s not holding up their end of the deal.
It’s smart and fair and means I can guarantee anyone who clicks on a tiny picture of a hot ass at SugarBank is going to get a significantly larger picture of a hot ass as their reward. Why isn’t it working?
I expected hundreds of sites to want to trade but today there are 19 who are active and trading and about 40 who’ve signed up but either never posted a link back or never sent a click. Assuming everyone online wants greater exposure – what kind of traffic trade would you find too compelling to ignore? If BLT’s not doing it for you why haven’t you signed up? Is it a lack of understanding about how the system works or something else? Is my description of how the trade works just too complex? I have no idea but I want to fix it. Unless blogs can trade traffic without dishonesty, or the craziness of a static links list filled with dead and unproductive links – one of the greatest tools of web-mastering won’t be available to bloggers. (My great tool is available by appointment – ba, BOOM!)
If you owned SugarBank and wanted to be able to promote 100 or more blogs and sites without being exploited or annoying your readers what would you do?
August 2nd, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 3rd, 2007
About once a year some asshole writes a story called something like “Bush, Condi ‘Israel Needs Porn Before Peace’” about how the most popular news stories online contain the word porn in their title. They go on to explain the key to massive popularity, and bags of money dropping from the sky, is a few well chosen keywords. Invariably, the story their deceptive title promised would have been more interesting than their suspect marketing analysis. Joel Stein’s addition to the canon for the LA Times is a prime example and, though funny, is complete bullshit.
Any headline the LA, NY or London Times publishes is seen by millions of people via websites, RSS feeds and news aggregators and the majority are ignored as old, irrelevant or repetitious. When a juicy headline appears publishers sees a surge of activity not because the internet’s responded to keywords, but because people have clicked through to read something they would have passed over.
Using a provocative keyword won’t work if you’re not already being ignored by a significant group of potential readers. If you’re not being regularly ignored, there’s no one to excite with a punchy headline who’s aware of who you are but outside your established readership. Search engines respond too slowly to make keywords useful for driving interest in specific items and the most likely result of an attempt to make content ‘keyword rich’ is getting blacklisted. To suggest a single-use in a headline is a clever trick would be laughable if it wasn’t ‘Fear Factor’ dumb.
If you do want to generate traffic for a site using headlines and keywords you need to be smart. Any keyword at all will work if you’re fast enough and when there are only 5 results for a search, you win if you’re one of them. The downside to a reliance on speed is moving down search results as fast as bigger sources with more authority catch up to you.
Far better is to think of an interesting, valid, angle on a current story around which you can write a headline interesting enough to get picked up by people digging for information. While CNN report ‘Beirut Shelling Crisis’ you capitalize by writing ‘Beirut Prostitutes Work Through Shelling.’ Even among a hundred results for a search on ‘Beirut, Shelling’ it’s going to get noticed and, if it’s linked by sites larger than yours, a positive feedback loop starts working on your behalf. Of course – it all starts with the story.
Guys like Joel Stein don’t care. Given a hundred LA Times articles to browse and only one which includes the phrases ‘Heidi Klum’, ‘naked’ and ‘cake’ where are you going to start? He gets to keep his job and the circle of bad marketing advice rolls on.
July 26th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 3rd, 2007
A vintage example of misleading advertising.
At least once each week my father receives a box of CD’s. These are not CD’s he wants, has asked for or will listen to. They contain badly recorded classical music which sounded great for 30 seconds in a TV commercial in which a kindly faced old man explained that by calling the number on-screen he’ll mail you a record because he likes you. In my father’s mind this idea, that philanthropic business organizations make TV commercials in order to help them distribute free gifts, seems perfectly reasonable.
He’s of the generation who thinks that there’s a secret league of just men who watch over commerce. If I tell him something’s a con he’ll say ‘If they were lying they wouldn’t be allowed on TV’. He doesn’t understand they only stopped using terminal patients as stunt dummies because they cost too much to scrape up.
Free only earns its definition ‘Given or available without charge.’ if you haven’t been asked to provide your payment information and a contact number. When you’re being asked to read the CV2 number from the back of your credit card, free means ‘we’ll charge you when you’ve forgotten about it.’ Only pensioners and people joining porn sites don’t to know this.
Old people are trusting because old age makes you stupid – most mathematicians are professionally irrelevant by the time they’re 40. The human brain is like a car. It can run well for a lifetime but the care involved in maintaining it is beyond most people. Unlike a car we can’t just buy a new one.
Porn consumers are trusting because however smart you are your genitals can out think you. They don’t even have to say anything. People capable of winning a debate with Socrates will cave to a tingly feeling in the underpants area.
The idea pushed by certain adult sites is, credit-cards are only available to adults and asking for credit card information is therefore a way of verifying someone’s age. This is not true. Many parents get them for their children in order to to set them on a path to lifelong debt, depression and bankruptcy thinking that’s worth is because they might be useful in an ‘emergency situations’; like priapism.
The fine print, which they don’t want you to read, will state that your free, or low cost, trial will become a ‘full membership’ at an inflated rate, if you fail to take specific cancellation steps in adequate time. These steps might include requesting your money back in iambic pentameter, mailing a letter made out to ‘Vomit Fuckers’ co-signed by your boss, parents and Rabi (if you’re not Jewish – tough luck) or phoning a premium-rate number and making your request in Tuvaluan.
The only free parts of any porn site are the bits you don’t have to fill in a form to access. Don’t believe the hype.
July 23rd, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 3rd, 2007
“If you can get 900 – 1,100 pieces out the door on a new release, you should go to your church and thank God. If you can get $10-$12 per release, you should go back to church and thank God.” – Greg Zeboray
Any observer of the adult market can tell there’s something wrong. I’d rather watch Rosie O’Donnell’s home movies than anything produced by Max Hardcore or Kahn Tusion and at least their work holds a morbid why-would-you-do-that fascination. Those who do enjoy their work should be locked up and the worst offenders, deserve nothing less than a starring role in their heroes next production. Most porn’s simply too boring to get aroused for, and ever greater choice means nothing when everything on offer looks the same.
Producers know that sales of DVD’s are dropping, websites are stagnating and what used to work, specifically making claims about content extravagant enough to be fraud and then hoping no one notices, doesn’t anymore.
Even in an industry where people who’ve read ‘The Da Vinci Code’ are considered intellectual, the lack of new ideas is surprising. The elephant in the room starved to death waiting to be noticed, and now, the people who pretended not to see it are asking each other ‘What’s that smell?’ It’s the elephant of change my friends (and I believe ‘Elephant of Change’ is a Scorpions tune).
In the 70s, at the birth of the modern porn industry, there was one type of porn and it was a movie, shot on film, paid for and distributed by the New York mafia and starring actors and models so high they thought ejaculation was acting and semen on the face was being legitimately modeled.
It was expensive. The whole process was illegal and, as even the mafia couldn’t afford to kill everyone involved with each production, everything took place in secret using people who were being paid danger money under the threat of arrest. You couldn’t get a movie called ‘Cum on my Tattoo’ made in 1975. People would have pointed out that tattoos fit sailors better than pretty women, that cum isn’t spelt like that, and that a title isn’t a script.
The difficulties made people care. Scripts were written and performers, laboring under the illusion they would be out of porn and in the mainstream six months hence, learned their lines and tried to act. Lighting meant more than a camera mounted ‘Sun Gun’ and the C in C-light didn’t stand for something Anglo-Saxon.
As video took over things got cheaper and while the business got more professional, the work began to suffer. In the early nineties it was legal to shoot hardcore sex in California, and the money being made from video sales made riches from the days of sticky-seats in damp theatres look like poverty. Women who hadn’t been through foster care, a cult or childhood abuse were beginning to consider taking their clothes off for money and Vivid invented the ‘contract star’ adding a glamour to being a performer it probably didn’t deserve. The genius of Ed Powers and Buttman, who between them originated the man, cam and creamy ham genre of porn verite we now call gonzo, was embraced more for it’s cheapness than it’s artistic novelty.
Suddenly everyone was making scud movies. Gonzo made the idea of making a porn movie a move quaint overnight. Under gonzo rules any noun-adjective combination capable of offending a priest was a title, the title was the script and every successful title spawned a series. You got extra points for alliteration. Pornographers were making the kind of money Halliburton kills for and just past the midpoint of the decade, DVDs crystal-clear freeze-frame and the work of Jenna Jameson combined to make the new format the biggest hit in consumer electronics history.
Quietly people started launching websites and then very noisily many of them became extremely rich. The adult movie industry took a deep breath, saw that late nineties technology was only able to deliver video that looked like the work of a furiously painting cat, and kept on churning out the gonzo.
Insert a decade where new websites appear daily and videos about as fast and we arrive at the present day. Video sales are tanking. The movie companies scratch their heads, blame the internet and talk about copy protection. Like General Motors who invested everything in SUV’s they didn’t think would ever stop selling the movie producers plan for the future was ‘More of the same’. As in the mainstream the first reaction to consumers using new technology in unexpected way is to cry ‘Foul Play’ and then to try and legislate and prosecute people back into the ‘More of the same’ game plan.
The web, which they’ve thus far seen as an addition to their almost profitless business of shipping polycarbonate an taking returns is now capable of offering consumers lower prices, and producers more profit, than they’ve ever dreamed possible. Wicked, Vivid and Digital Playground could be making $15 on a $20 sale but in order to grab the digital distribution model they have to let go of DVD’s (or at least put them aside leaving space for something else). It’s like asking a paranoid toddler to give you their toy in exchange for the better one in your hands. They’re unhappy they don’t have it but refuse to understand they can’t carry both.
Maybe in a month or two, when Steve Jobs rolls out Apple’s online movie store, porn valley may wake up. But if the movie industry’s succeeded in imposing an unworkable model on Apple (and they’ve been trying – they’re desperate to fail), it might be the wrong example. No one’s going to pay for a downloadable movie they can’t copy or lend to a friend like a DVD costing exactly the same amount.
The web’s in trouble too. For years sales in adult have been stagnant. New buyers aren’t being brought in as fast as new sites are launching and, with everyone competing on a subscription model costing buyers from $120-$360 a year per site, most buyers join a site, download all the content, and then move on to the next one. What looks like progress is just standing still and the constant churn in memberships is a fault of the model, not the content.
The upshot is this. What were once two businesses, a video business on DVD and a photo business on the web, are now becoming one. The web can do video, photos and text. DVD can only do video. It’s obvious which will yield and besides – the answer to ever media question is ‘The internet’ and this one’s no different.
While Sony delay the release of Blu-Ray discs people become more comfortable with getting their video off the web. The quality can be as high as your prepared to wait for and no one needs to know that you get aroused watching women pop balloons with their bottom.
The content, not the format is the business. Success will come via positive feedback and great ideas. The playing field will be level, every producer will be able to talk to every customer and nothing will ever go out of stock. While many people would never walk into a porn store, no one’s embarrassed to visit a URL and while producers today consider making $15,000 on a two-hour DVD a coup, online they’ll be able to make $50,000 on a 20 min clip. In a month.
With no incentive to release product people aren’t excited about and immediate feedback, no one will be fooled by the pictures on the box (there is no box). People will be free to innovate and the old guarantee that a a decent box and a cute girl on the cover will sell enough to cover costs will no longer hold true. Online reputation is everything and, able to communicate freely and anonymously cowardly perverts will be happy to expound on the failings of their chosen masturbatory material.
The key to this is a system for making this rather obvious, pretty wonderful, future happen is the right technology and website. A place where this content lives and can be accessed by anyone, at any time, secure in the knowledge their financial information’s safe and their bits will arrive. It’s an idea I’ve been working on for the past 3 years, the reason I started blogging in the first place and worth a couple of hundred million dollars a year according to people who’ve seen the business plan.
If you’re looking for porn with better content, better technical quality and at better prices – I’m working to deliver it to you (and make myself rich enough to use supermodels as footstools but that’s not important right now)
If you want to own a piece of the future (and be 5-35% as rich as me) – you know where to find me. The difference between launching this project in 2006 and launching it in 2007 is about enough cash to buy a crappy house in a good neighborhood. I’m not a patient man.
July 13th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 3rd, 2007
As for many business books the core idea in ‘The Long Tail‘ can be communicated in a single paragraph. Unfortunately, as you can’t currently sell a paragraph, a book’s been written which, ironically, makes a clear argument for why you should be able to sell a paragraph.
The Long Tail – One paragraph edition
Research shows that on the web the ‘80/20′ rule is a myth. ‘80/20′ supposes that for a given enterprise 80% of sales come from the most popular 20% of products. The ‘Long Tail’ shows that when you measure the value of sales for a web based company like Amazon – and not just assume ‘80/20′ works – the majority of profits come from sales of the least popular products. I.e. on the classic ‘Long Tail’ graph, which shows products on the x-axis and sales volume on the y-axis, the combined value of sales in the ‘long tail’ is worth more than those in the ‘fat head’. So in a reversal of ‘common sense’ the least popular 80% of your stock is worth more to the bottom line than the top 20%.
Easy huh?
There’s more to it that that of course. ‘80/20′ isn’t just bad thinking. It works in the real world – hence its wide adoption – and the ‘long tail’ is limited to the web. Why?
Offline keeping products in stock costs money, and the longer products sit unsold the more they cost to keep. For that reason at a certain point it makes more sense to give items away than leave them on the shelf taking space which could be given to faster selling lines. It’s the reason retailers work so hard to ensure they focus on what’s hottest. Though limiting stock makes stores less useful for buyers, it maximizes profits.
Online the cost of stocking an item is (often) zero. Most of the stuff sold by Amazon goes straight from the factory to the customer without every touching the hands of an Amazon employee (it’s called ‘drop-shipping’, the manufacturer just packs things to look Amazon branded and mails to buyers directly). In that circumstance the cost of keeping an item ‘in stock’ at Amazon is the cost of maintaining a web-page, which is effectively zero. The zero cost means Amazon can stock tens of thousands of items which don’t sell fast at no cost to itself. As their ’stock’ isn’t a financial drain, if they sell a CD only once in ten years, their profit on it is the same as it is on their most popular items.
The net effect is profound. Whereas offline retailers make most money on their most popular items (because they stay in stock for the shortest time) and some slow moving products make no profit at all, online, thanks to the ‘long tail’, all sales are equal.
The lessons are clear:
Stock everything. The more products you have, the longer your tail and the ‘long tail’ only works when people can buy things which are unpopular. If they can’t find the unpopular items they want on your site, they’ll visit a competitor.
Break it up. More products is better, even when some they cater to tiny niches. The ‘long tail’ says that selling movies by scene, individual photographs and expensive premium products can be profitable if you let them sit in the market long enough to find an audience.
Make it browsable. Having a vast range of products online is useless if people can’t find them easily. Good search tools and a clear site structure are vital. You need to draw people in so they can find the stuff they might want which isn’t a bestseller. To paraphrase (or perhaps quote?) Seth Godin – “Give as much as you can away without slitting your own throat”. The deeper they get into your archive, the more they’ll find to buy.
So now you don’t have to buy ‘The Long Tail’ the book but I recommend that you do; until the board at Amazon read it and you can buy individual blog posts, guys like Chris will have to write books in order to make a buck. For writing about marketing fact (rare) instead of marketing theory (common) he deserves as many martinis and bikinis as he can afford.
July 11th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 2nd, 2007
Regular readers, Europol and those who stalk me, are aware that I travel a lot. This year I’ve been in Latvia, England, Sweden, New Zealand, America and South Africa thus far and that’s not to mention traveling within those countries (or next week’s trip to Namibia).
I love working it, but am finding the constant movement difficult to reconcile with living like a grown-up. It’s odd to own a car in California I can never drive and weirder still to find yourself saying “Those shoes are either in Latvia or London.” It’d be nice to have somewhere to call home again and have a toaster to call my own.
Unfortunately my current consulting work requires I stay mobile so I’m therefore in the market for a job (or enough ‘fixed-base’ consulting work to fill my day.) I’m still love to travel, I just don’t want to be away for weeks at a time without respite. I’m not too concerned about the location and tele-commuting’s fine. All I ask is that I’m challenged, and valued for my ability to suggest things which have one third of the room laughing, one third edging away and the other third wondering why they hadn’t thought of that yet.
My experience is pretty varied. I’ve worked in Marketing, PR, Sales, Advertising/Copywriting and Publishing. If I was to pick an area in which I’m most expert I’d say web marketing, closely followed by advertising. If I were to specify where I’ve had most post graduation training I’d say sales, and if I was to say where I’d had the most high-profile successes I’d say PR. I’m essentially a multi-tool (though some people who know me well drop the ‘multi’). Though I can manage a team to implement a plan, my real value is thinking ahead of the competition and generating novel ways of getting things done. Environments which don’t appreciate innovation are the only ones I’ve ever been unable to feel comfortable in.
Contrary to the evidence of this blog, I’ve spent the majority of my professional life in the mainstream so anyone worried about me being house-trained needn’t fret. I can keep my trousers on for a whole meeting (only if I concentrate) and the companies I work with currently recognize the usefulness of someone with a foot in many camps, there’s a lot which can be learned on all sides. Besides, my Dad would prefer it.
If you know of something that might fit my skills, please send me an email. As long as I can spend at least six months a year in one city – I’m interested. Thanks in advance.
PS. Don’t worry about the blogs, they’re not going anywhere.
June 23rd, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 2nd, 2007
The adult movie market’s freaking out. Sales are down and people suspect the internet’s got something to do with it. Though it may seem like a joke to anyone who’s watching the movie industry make the same mistakes the record companies, many in the adult world think the mainstream’s getting it right and long for the day they can start suing downloaders too.
Excuse me while I take a laughter break.
Putting aside the uncomfortable damaging public ‘discovery’ adult companies will make if they try this – a lot of porn’s downloaded by horny kids – the impact of a legal assault on downloaders has thus far been zero.
Piracy is unstoppable. It’s always existed – from sneaking into movie theaters without paying, through the first home VHS-to-VHS rigs and onto the age of DVD burners and Pirate Bay. The web’s brought piracy to light, and punched holes in antique business models which mean that material available in one place is often not available in any form elsewhere – but the web’s not changed the nature of piracy or the reason people violate copyright.
People who steal content are those who don’t have any money (like kids) and those who don’t think a product’s worth paying for. In both cases, stopping piracy, even if possible, wouldn’t result in any sales gain. The poor can’t buy, the indifferent refuse to.
There is a group of pirates who are worth money, and they’re the group least worth suing as they’d love to be customers. These people download the second season of Lost before it airs in their country, trade concert bootlegs and share copies of movies you can’t buy. These ‘pirates’ are people who want to spend money but can’t. Either because what they want is unavailable or, if it is, it’s in a form or at a price which makes it unattractive. Give these pirates a well thought out, intelligently priced, system to buy what they pirate and they’ll stop downloading tomorrow.
The reason piracy hurts pornographers, (and I’ve never heard this mentioned in any discussion of the piracy problem) – is that downloaders use the web to try before they buy.
The industry would challenge my statement. It believes there are only two options for consumers, stealing or buying, and to them anyone who hasn’t paid upfront certainly won’t pay afterwards. It seems fairly logical until you think of how the DVD market actually works.
Aside from porn, everything sold on DVD is being consumed for the second time, it’s a collectors medium allowing people to collect movies and TV show’s they’ve seen and enjoyed. If you know you like it, $20 not a lot to spend on a movie. Pornographers can’t play that game. Their product can usually only be seen on DVD. They print boxes designed to entice you to take a leap of faith, trying to convince browsers that an unknown DVD’s worth twice as much as a movie ticket. Given a beautiful model (who might not be in the movie) and time with Photoshop they got pretty good at it and plenty of people bought adult DVDs based on the box alone (in fact jizz bizz retailers don’t watch the movies they sell at all, just reviewing the boxes and picking what to stock based on that.)
The internet’s made the boxes irrelevant. It’s the adult channel no-one ever built where, for the time it takes to download a file, you can see any material without risking any cash. Now porn buyers, who’ve for years taken risks and been disappointed, can try before they buy and ignore the well-packaged crap.
Try before you buy is not a problem if your product’s good. Family Guy is perhaps the most pirated TV series in history, which many people saw the for the first time online, after it had been cancelled by Fox. When DVD’s were available millions of people who’d downloaded the shows already, went out to buy them, making it the best selling DVD in history too. Piracy, better named unauthorized distribution, actively sells good products by getting them into the hands of potential customers the way radio play sells music. Just like music, and unfortunately for much porn, it kills crap stone dead.
If the adult industry wants to treat DVD’s like movie tickets, where people pay without knowing exactly what they’re going to get, prices will have to come down, production values will have to go up and marketing has to reach Snakes on a Plane levels of low budget brilliance.
Mainstream record, TV and movie companies know you can sell product people want, marketing stops working when people start talking. Pornographers are upset the web’s revealed their product to be undesirable to a mass of people who experience it and the solution to that problem is better product, not suing downloaders.
Unauthorized online distribution – or piracy – is a huge boon for porn. Finally there’s a way round cable operators and distributors which costs producers nothing to exploit. The audience is willing and the channels are in place. If people don’t consider your movie worth paying for once they’ve seen it whose fault is that? DVDs aren’t movie tickets, their collectables. The problem is most porn’s not worth collecting.
The difference between talking to friends and selling to customers.
June 20th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 2nd, 2007
Though I won’t meet the majority of the people who read SugarBank, many of you are strangers I consider friends. I’m acutely aware (I’m ‘a-cute’ too but that’s a different conversation) this blog is my face, action, and every word I say to a large group of you. By necessity this blog is me and I try to make sure it presents a persona people have fun hanging out with.
So blogs are avatars.
Without a handshake or a face, bloggers survive purely via a reputation for being honest, entertaining or erudite (I don’t actually know what erudite means). Even the most corporate blogs, gathering their material from press-releases, know the only way they can maintain their readers respect is by commenting on and criticizing PR hackery instead of rubber-stamping it.
Blogs are not:
Direct mail – “ON SALE TODAY! The Floppytronic 40,000 is now available for just 3 low monthly payments…”
Clumsy sales pitches – “Driving my Ford F150 into work today I was struck by how the Premium Vortex air-conditioning is able to keep me cool in the worst LA traffic has to offer…”
PR or crisis management – “Despite this weekend’s sever troubles and some unfortunate lost orders, we at Amazon are proud to still deliver over 98% of packages on-time…” (there’s a better, more honest and open way to say sorry)
So when a handful of business and people recently approached me with an interest in buying SugarBank the question at the bottom of the pile, after all the above had been explained by me was, “How can we make money from your blog?”
The answer is simple. Business blogs are corporate avatars.
The first attempts by companies to build avatars was called branding. Branding experts hoped you’d believe the people and things in ads were somehow like the companies they cavorted with. Marlboro wanted you to feel like a smoking cowboy, not a oxygen-bottle dragging invalid. Budweiser wanted you to think about tanned girls in Daisy Dukes, not fat men fighting in bars. Branding meant seeping into peoples mind’s by constant repetition and that meant advertising, which meant messages had to be short and simple. Sometimes it worked, more often it didn’t and only companies with deep pockets could afford to try and pound their way into our collective subconscious.
Blogs give branding to everyone. Instead of forcing a company to build a personality 30 seconds at a time on TV, they allow business to use real people, with real personality, to become the talkative embodiment of their brand.
Thought of in that light, covering a corporate blog in ads and judging its performance by how many boxes it shifts is ridiculous. You don’t hire a celebrity to represent your company and then require them to sell memberships on TV. You’re buying their glamour, character and influence. Bogs work the same way.
Some companies have had avatars for years, Apple’s Steve Jobs and Walt Disney, being famous examples. When Steve Jobs spends five minutes every six months telling a room full of people about the new iPod, he sells more of them than all of Apple’s other advertising combined. He’s not selling anything directly, just telling his friends (the Apple faithful) how cool he thinks they are. That’s what blogs can do for companies.
The question is, can your organization endure the detergent sunshine a blog will bring to bear, knowing that means they’ll have to deal with some mistakes in public? Understanding that means discussing your competitors honestly as well as yourself? Realizing that your most earnest critics are often your most passionate customers.
‘Yes’ is the only sane answer to that question. There are only two types of problem, real ones worth fixing and misunderstandings to be explained. A blogger can help with both, not only bringing a company an endless stream of attention, but also via the informal focus group its readers represent.
(When Apple announce their plan to ‘fix’ the scandal of their iPod factories they’ll be the only ‘cruelty free’ MP3 player people feel confident to buy and Steve Jobs will have earned respect as a compassionate capitalist.)
Of course, that makes blogs useless for selling the kind of junk which can only survive in the controlled environment of a late-night infomercial, where even unhappy customers feel too ashamed to tell their friends about the mistakes they’ve made, but why invest in marketing when you could be fixing your product?
To anyone who’s thinking of building a blog for your company that’s how I believe you should do it. Make sure the companies something to be proud of, then make your blog the person that company would be. That way you’ll command an audience of friends who will listen to what you say – advertising that can’t be bought.
June 19th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 2nd, 2007
This weekend, after trying to watch the fifth season of 24 (about six hours in I had to acknowledge it’s just shit) I noticed a couple of things about how blogs grow worth sharing.
Recently, close watchers of the Sugarverse, will have noticed that a few blogs of mine have lain dormant (while one was sold entirely – I’ll never forget you PSPporn…)
The reason for the upheaval has been greed. A motivation I’m not alone in having but may be alone in admitting to. It’s hard to invest time and energy in things that don’t seem to grow as fast as you’d like. Especially when you believe the ideas are strong.
This weekend, after trying to watch the fifth season of 24 (about six hours in I had to acknowledge it’s just shit) I noticed a couple of things about how blogs grow worth sharing.
When looking at statistics we have two options. Long columns of numbers and graphs. Very few people can learn much from looking at long columns of numbers and those who do tend to rock back and forth in their seats dribbling.
Graphs are problematic too, because over small scales it’s hard to know what you’re looking at. Real data is lumpy, and a bumpy line might represent a trend that’s straight or curved, moving up or down. It’s a matter of interpretation and in particular, the range os data you observe.
We tend to naturally think in straight lines. Linear change is easy to predict and dominant in the real world. When you catch a ball you guess where to put your mouth hand by assuming the ball’s not going to change speed by a significant amount. We’re hard-wired to be linear.
Linear growth, like bad sex, is predictable. If you get 5 new subscribers a month you’re growing in a linear fashion and, starting with 10 subscribers over time you’d see this:
The numbers I was looking at this weekend were for pageviews, and on all my blogs they have grown over time. I’d assumed growth was linear and therefore extrapolating forward made the prospect of catching up with more established blogs seem depressingly impossible.
This weekend, being weird, having a science degree, and a little tipsy after trying to drink my way through Keifer Sutherland’s acting (Sutherland has two styles. Quiet.. whispery voice and LOUD SHOUTY VOICE!), I began to think and realized blogs don’t grow linearly at all.
A link from Boing Boing sends more readers than a link from ‘Jacks Bollock Blog – One Man Blogs His Balls’, because a percentage of their readers respond to posts. The more readers a blog has, the more people it can send across a hyperlink and the number of people subscribing to a blog will always be a percentage of the people who read it. It’s logical to assume, and easy to show, that the more visitors you have the more pageviews and subscribers you’ll have too.
Plotting growth based on percentage increases describes an exponential (ski-jump) curve.
Looking at the same data with this assumption, using 10% growth as our guess, we get numbers that look like this:
We seem to have gone backwards. I’ve got half the number I did with the linear growth model above. (Worse still, as you can’t have half a subscriber or pageview so your numbers would in the real world be even worse than that once rounded down.) Sure we could up the growth rate, but how realistic would 50% growth be for a sustained period?
However when we extending both models (and plot them side by side for easy comparison) something cool happens:
Suddenly, those 10% increases look pretty good. In fact, the last step shown represents a jump as large as the first 25 steps combined.
Plotted on a graph the growth rates looks like this:
(Which of course you’ll never see. Exponential growth quickly gets ridiculous and can only ever exist for limited periods. When you get really big, really fast your growth slows as you run out of customers, resources, space etc.)
As blogs grow at a percentage rate, as long as you’re still growing overall, all blogs must be somewhere on that curve. What’s tough to remember is how flat the first part of that curve looks. It looks and feels flat but it’s not. Stay on it long enough and your returns will accelerate far beyond what a linear growth assumption would suggest.
The things to consider are:
Can can growth be sustained long enough for explosive growth to materialize?
Is your audience large enough to take you there?
So things might not be as bad as you think (but that’s not really enough on its own for a blog post so I wrote all that other stuff.)
“When you’re going through hell, keep going.” Winston Churchill
May 21st, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 2nd, 2007
Porn producers fight to retain customers by producing ever greater quantities of material just like the stuff they’ve sold before. Microsoft struggle to preserve compatibility with 20 year old software and produce bloated, bug-ridden, hard-to-secure software as a result. GM make big, heavy cars for people who erroneously think heavy = safe and that big outside means big inside (ever been in a Hummer?).
Their mistake? Listening to customers. Here are three good reasons not to:
They’re vocal – That’s distracting. If you listen closely it’s easy to think the 10 people writing email represent more of your customers than they do.
They’re already your customers – By catering to the needs of people you’ve already served your products become increasingly narrowly aimed at that group, at the expense of people who would buy from you if you did something a little different. (That’s GM’s problem – want a huge fuel guzzling truck with no ride or quality? Come right over! Want an executive saloon as good as anything made in Germany, Japan or Italy… er… Cadillac? Not so much…)
They can’t ask for what they can’t imagine – It’s almost impossible to praise what you haven’t experienced but easy to knock holes in new ideas. If you ask before you do the negative feedback is always easier to find than the positive meaning feedback on ideas is worth far less than feedback on products. Unfortunately, critics will happily buy revolutionary products from people brave enough to innovate.
Remember, without innovation we’d never have lived to see the Mongolian Clusterfuck.
May 10th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 2nd, 2007
In a few minutes the auction for PSPporn.com will close and the domain will remain unsold.
Okay it’s over. Done. $255. Sold to… well no one at all. Not even close to my reserve.
Bollocks – but let’s make lemonade and see if there’s a backstory here we can learn from. (N.B. never say ‘let’s make lemonade’ on a porn-set, especially if there was any asparagus at lunch).
The last time I listed a domain on eBay three things happened.
I got a ton of emails asking why the domain didn’t have a ‘for sale’ notice displayed.
A debate sprang up online over my identity in which people produced proof that I didn’t own the TGP.com domain, mainly because I wasn’t active on adult webmaster message boards (which is still true – most of them won’t give me membership for some reason).
Bidding closed at over $100,000 (and reached such embarrassing numbers privately that I was mentally shopping for exotic automobiles for a week before I had a change of heart. That’s how good I am with money – give me half a million, I shop for cars.)
PSPporn.com is not as valuable a domain at TGP.com but it’s not bad. The PSP is aimed at the perfect porn demographic, ‘PSP Porn’ is THE search term for the niche it serves, and there are a number of companies making significant money producing or reformatting adult material for Sony’s handheld platform. PSPporn.com is a domain there’s a market for so based on my last domain auction experience I spent 30 seconds this week designing the world’s simplest eBay listing and waited for bids to soar into four-figures and beyond.
What the fuck happened?
I made three basic mistakes which, if you have a domain to sell, or are trying to get into the adult industry without building a brand from scratch using a purchased domain name, there’s something to learn from:
Not putting out a press release for the auction meant that the bulk of the adult industry was unaware the sale was taking place (amazingly there are people who still don’t read this blog)
Assuming people understood the value of branding was too generous.
Porn can be the hardest way to make an easy living (if you got the musical reference good for you – if not, the point still stands)
I was selling a brand, not a seven letter domain. No one knew and those who did bid on a seven letter domain.
Sure it’s a brand built by Sony (PSP) and lust (Porn) but in combination it’s a key to young men with high-disposable incomes who’ve bought a wi-fi enabled gaming device which places such severe limitations on their browsing experience specially formatted content is needed to optimize content. If I had an archive of content people were prepared to pay for I wouldn’t consider selling the domain at all. Knowing that whatever you build online will have an audience from the start is worth a lot.
Which brings me to AdultAmerica.com whose owner, Al Sokol, is taking bids starting at $2,000,000 for the domain. That’s $2M for a domain that hasn’t hosted an active website in 11 years, that no one’s ever heard of, and those who have heard of can’t remember anyway.
That’s not a typo.
Versus $255 bid for PSPporn.com – a brand built by Sony targeted at men in their late twenties with high disposable incomes and an demonstrated love of technology.
If Al gets his money something’s gone very wrong indeed. I’ve got to go off and have a little weep now.
May 5th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: July 2nd, 2007
Apologies to anyone who signed up to swap links with me using BLT in the past few months who’s noticed that links haven’t been appearing here since the last redesign. Something seems to have broken the code and I’ve had no joy contacting the brains who’ve built it for answers. I predict this post will prompt an email from someone and lead me to a fix, you to massive prosperity and perhaps all of us to a cheesy medal-giving ceremony like the one at the end of Star Wars. Until then enjoy the majesty of this Ugandan Warthog which, like BLT when it’s working properly, is bacon you shouldn’t mess with.
A paper whose most accurate reporting is in its horoscope column. An organ read by people who think crime rates would be lower is prisons were more violent. A journal whose writing could only be made less attractive if printed on pages of compressed dandruff in ink distilled from liquid shit.
But yesterday I considered buying it because they’re giving away DVD’s for a week and $1 for ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets‘ is very hard to argue with.
That I’ll consider buying a reprehensible piece of krypto-facist propaganda because it comes with a decent free movie should mean I’m not allowed to vote but I’m clearly not alone. Every paper in the UK is currently pulling the same DVD giveaway stunt (I ended up with a copy of the Guardian, ‘Super Size Me‘ on DVD and a clear conscience.)
Blogs are playing the same game. According to del.icio.us, each day’s most popular blog posts don’t come from a small group of super-blogs, but are more commonly interesting posts from blogs you wouldn’t want to read if presented with 90% of their regular programming.
Apparently what you give away is more important than what you are.
Why I chose Adbrite, the contextual ad network pornographer's trust.
April 19th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 30th, 2007
(NB – that title’s so un-toppable it might mark the end of this blog entirely.)
Contextual ads as served by the Google and Yahoo! don’t work well for most blogs and don’t work at all for sex-sites (if you don’t believe me – so arrogant… – read my previous two posts).
AdBrite, and some other ad networks I care about less because I’m not currently using them, offer one important benefit over other contextual ad services in that they’ll sell ads for you.
Instead of waiting for your next post on squirting to pull an ad for a wet-and-dry Roomba, you gain the benefit of an advertising team. That team – twentysomething marketing grads who dream of a future life where they don’t sell ads to strangers on the phone and blue leads – use their computers to sell ads on your site for you. That means you get emails saying that company A want to pay you X per day for running an ad on your blog. All you have to do is approve it and that’s why I use AdBrite.
Their contextual ads aren’t much to write home about, but getting a check for a flat-rate ad deal is. Even making $2 a day puts you ahead of the vast majority of sites surviving via contextual ads alone.
The downside to networks like AdBrite is that advertisers, simple-minded folk that they are, tend to favor the largest sites they can find. Even though they might get better value by spreading their ads over a thousand tiny sites, they’d generally rather stick with a couple of large ones that are easy to justify. For small site that means the advertisers often don’t come knocking at all.
Currently there’s no adult specific ad network I’m aware of. AdBrite sell their technology under the AVN brand to adult sites but it’s still just AdBrite. Is there space for a sex-blog/site specific ad network? Sure. The technology’s simple, getting people to sell ads isn’t. AdBrite clearly don’t have strong ties with the adult industry, or aren’t very good at selling to porn companies. Their inventory for the jizz-bizz category isn’t very strong and that means advertisers can be extremely picky about whom they fund.
The best return is always having a direct relationship with the companies selling products as fewer middle-men means more profit for you. Until a site’s large enough to attract advertisers directly, or there’s an adult site specific ad network, my guess is that it will remain easier to make cash via affiliate programs than contextual ads.
Why there's more to online advertising than Google.
April 18th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 30th, 2007
Yesterday’s post spurred today’s post so forgive the incestuous mental run-on. I doubt it’ll stain.
‘Miss Knees’ mentioned that she had problems finding a source of contextual ads which works well. My immediate thought was why bother. Then I thought explaning that reaction might be useful. So…
What is a contextual ad?
Contextual advertising is the ‘innovation’ behind Google’s wealth. Instead of placing the same ads everywhere – like a billboard on the street – contextual advertising places ads close to things that interest people who might be interested in the ad. Like a billboard for Nike beside a sneaker store. Hang on, perhaps this isn’t such a new idea…
What are the advantages of contextual ads?
The theory is that by placing relevant ads on webpages the chances of getting someone to click on them and spend money is higher. This is generally true.
How can I get contextual ads onto my site?
The most famous contextual ad program is Google adsense. Yahoo! offers something very similar and there are a host of competing programs. The major programs are well run, slick and easy to implement.
Are there any downsides to contextual ads?
Firstly you’re an affiliate of an affiliate. If Acme Corp. wants to advertise on Google they might offer the search engine giant $5 for each click Google can send. Google then gets you to send the clicks but takes $4 of each $5 and pays the remaining $1 to you. Hardly fair. Worse still Google doesn’t declare what its revenue split is. Numbers as high as 78.5 cents on each dollar (sorry that’s a worthless – gotta pay NY Times-doesn’t-get-it link) have been mentioned but it’s likely Google pay advertisers differently depending on how much they earn. Essentially Google promise to pay you ‘well’ but won’t go public with how much they keep.
The second major drawback is sex itself. Google and Yahoo! don’t have large stocks of adult ads and are limited in what they can offer sex(y) websites. Even if you have lots of readers you might not be able to get ads that fit your site.
Then there are problems the contextual ad technology itself as it relates to blogs.
Technological problems? What are you talking about? Google can do anything!
Contextual ads would work very well indeed if they were placed by people but unfortunately they’re placed by computer algorithms, and the giant mechanical brains which make placement decisions are still appallingly dumb.
The algorithms work okay when websites contain keyword rich pages. If you write about drugs or technology they have no problem identifying stuff like ‘Xanax’, ‘Propecia’, ‘Playstation’ or ‘Printer’. On search engine pages this works perfectly as each search query is a string of keywords, but on blogs there’s a problem.
Even though most blogs have a theme they are constructed as groups of pages each holding a single post. To place a contextual ad on a single-post-page the algorithm has to be able to identify the theme of the blog accurately and that’s enough to choke today’s cutting edge machine intelligence.
E.g. On a blog filled with erotic stories the best products to advertise may be vibrators and adult DVDs, but give Google’s contextual ad tool a page which features an erotic story set on a train and it’ll provide a list of ads for travel services.
If it were a person you’d slap it.
This flaw seriously limits the effectiveness of contextual ads on sites that don’t deal with keyword friendly topics like iPods and Digital Cameras. Sex sites, which tend to deal in concepts that aren’t easy to connect (i.e. fisting=Crisco) need smarter options.
So don’t sweat it Miss Knees. Contextual ads (as served by Google et al) and sex-blogs don’t mix.
(Ad networks are part of the answer and if anyone wants more on that – let me know.)
April 17th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 30th, 2007
“Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission” – Fred Allen
I’ve been spending a lot of time poring over advertising figures recently, something I abhor – a process of realizing that you’re being fucked, either deliberately or by incompetence, that there will be no orgasm and if there is – it’s merely evidence of fiduciary rape.
Affiliate programs aren’t bad, but they are risky. Websites using them place responsibility for their marketing with affiliates (that’s you and me) in return for a promise of shared wealth when sales are made. They have nothing to lose as they’ll only every pay you a portion of what they’ll make from each customer. You have everything to lose – if for some reason you can’t make sales it’s your pockets that will remain empty, your time and traffic that’s been wasted.
Don’t let the pictures of BMW’s and Hummers fool you (why they think I want a Hummer that’s not delivered by a Natasha from the Ukraine is beyond me). Affiliate programs make them richer than you. Content is king.
For those wanting to dip there toes into the water (and you can make a lot of money from affiliate advertising if you get it right) here are a few tips for the novice/confused/poor adult website affiliate:
Use more than one program at a time.
Affiliate advertising programs make fraud easy so the wise person has to assume some fraud is taking place. The only measure you have is being able to compare the performance of programs relative to each other so it’s something you have to do. If you put all your eggs in one basket it’s impossible to know if you’re being screwed. However attractive the deal ($150 per sign up May! IT’S MADNESS!) don’t give them everything you have.
Check who’s doing the billing.
When you join a program you’ll be able to see statistics for your traffic and earnings. Often these pages will be part of an off-the-shelf system run by a major billing company. This is a good thing. Big billing companies have nothing to gain from participating in fraud on behalf of a website. If the program’s being administered by the people who stand to profit from it the risks are far higher – elections are decided by those who count the votes.
Check the supplemental materials.
The primary ways to promote websites is via free content (i.e. photosets and videoclips) and advertising banners. Check to see what’s offered by the programs your in and how often material is updated. Maintaining an affiliate program is a lot easier than maintaining a website, if it’s not being done efficiently you can assume the websites being promoted suck at least as hard as the system you’re accessing. Anything that smacks of poor professionalism will cost you money.
Grade their website(s).
You’re going to send people to check out a website that’ll only pay you if people are compelled to become customers. You can get a strong sense of how likely this is by looking at the website in question yourself. Does it look good? Is it easy to navigate? Would you pay for it? If you’re not excited enough to open your wallet – why would other people be? You can only get people to their store, at that point your income depends on their ability to present their product.
Know the system.
All affiliate programs work the same way. In return for sending a company a customer they pay you a kickback. Your slice can be a flat fee, a percentage of the purchase or a percentage of all a customer’s purchases from that point forward. Other programs promise to pay ‘per click’ but this is still a percentage of purchase as they’ll only pay anything is a set percentage of your ‘clicks’ become customers.
You can get screwed in two ways. Firstly they can claim that you don’t generate any sales at all and pay you nothing. This is pretty stupid and unlikely to happen. They assume you’re measuring them against their competitors and if they were to burn you that hard, you’d stop sending people their way and they’d lose out. Far more likely is that they’ll ’skim’ your traffic, paying you for fewer sales than you in fact generate. Fraud of that type’s almost impossible to detect but, if you always run a number of programs simultaneously and constantly ditch your poorest performers, you’ll at least know that the people treating you worst aren’t unduly rewarded. There are honest, profitable, programs out there, they just take time to find. Honesty’s one of the reasons programs run by billing companies (who would be insane to ’skim’) are easier to trust than others.
I hope that’s useful primer material. If there’s interest I might share some data regarding affiliate programs for adult sites that I know work well from experience. If that sounds useful let me know. Otherwise good luck and email me about any great programs you think I might not know about (I want that hummer).
the mainstream movie industry continues to misunderstand the web.
April 5th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 29th, 2007
This week Movielink and CinemaNow (disclaimer – I’ve worked for CinemaNow) announced they were going to make movies available for download on the same day DVD’s hit stores.
In DRM’d Windows Media format.
For $30 a movie.
Dumb, dumb, dumb…
The Windows Media is predictable. I’ve been to the events Microsoft’s been wooing the big movie studios with since the late ’90’s. They’ve thrown open the big Seattle checkbook and have made the once expensive prospect of getting content into Windows Media format at high-quality free. I realized how serious Microsoft were about winning the format wars when I started meeting with their ‘black-ops’ unit a few years back. Contractors whose job it was to funnel money to major porn companies and get them to switch to Windows Media as their primary format. It worked (money tends to) and if you take a look at the big commercial porn sites see what they’re using and think about how they paid for the hardware necessary to make the switch.
MS are more than happy to pay the encoding fees (and the gorgeous looking stuff this isn’t being done on Dell’s – it’s serious hardware, artificial intelligence stuff in cool-offices in suburban LA) if it means end users get Windows Media. In a world before iTunes, podcasting and YouTube they thought it was just about being more ubiquitous than Real and Quicktime.
The announced pricing’s less easy to explain. Clearly a compromise to keep DVD store owners fears about losing sales at bay, it guarantees the easiest way to get a DVD quality download you can play on any computer will remain the peer-2-peer services. Handily they’ll be providing pirates with really excellent source material.
Dumb, dumb, dumb…
So the movie industry invests in its own demise while waiting to be shown a path by Apple, and the the jizz-bizz -Â cutting edge! Bold! Innovative! – follows suit.
Vivid’s DVD download service which launched on Monday makes exactly the same mistakes as the mainstream services. You can download a DVD from Vivid and burn it to a disc, but you can only make one DVD from each file and the cost is $25, equal to what you’d pay for a professionally stamped disc.
Vivid’s attempt at controlling transfer of their movies is pointless, you can copy any DVD as often as you want using a cheap PC and you can’t lose sales to people who’ve already bought your product. The counter argument, that people who make copies feed the file-sharers isn’t valid either. You only need one digital copy to feed an infinite number of downloaders and as soon as there’s one illegal copy online – and there always will be – having 1000 more makes no real difference. They’re all the same and equally easy to transfer.
This isn’t a debate on the merits of DRM but stopping people copying digital files is impossible, attempts to do so harm sales more than helps them and from a business perspective DRM is an total waste of time. There’s not a single product with copy protection that isn’t being copied by people who want to and there’s nothing in iTunes that you can’t get for free elsewhere. The people who are buy things aren’t just too dumb or scared to steal them.
The pricing’s also wrong. With profits on a $20 DVD averaging about $11 a unit, and the majority of the costs gone for online distribution where no packaging, duplication, storage or shipping is required, $25 a download is a stick-up. $10 a download would preserve current profit levels and sell four times as many movies. In all it’s so nonsensical that there has to be a reason for it besides massive head-in-the-sand stupidity. Predictably it’s money.
Vivid aren’t stupid. They know that any way to get a DVD quality movie to a computer will find a market and there’s going to be a huge shift in expectation when Apple define what the movie download business should be later this year. In the same way iTunes has educated the public that a downloaded song is worth $.99, they’ll set a price for downloaded movies that’ll be hard to argue (unless they mess it up and it’s not worth betting they will).
Until Apple write the rules, Vivid can set their own and will enjoy making a vast profit from their keenest users.
Beyond that adult movies will follow the path set out for them online. For years websites have been getting $20 a month from users – a far higher per-customer average than any video company can claim, but movie downloads will put the studios back in the game.
Instead of selling 120 mins of DVD for $25 they can sell 10 (cheaper to produce) scenes for $5 a pop to downloaders – porn movies lose almost nothing on the chopping block – and selling 4-5 clips uses less bandwidth and requires less support than stocking a website. At that point the subscription model doesn’t look very profitable by comparison and selling DVD’s becomes the slowest, most costly way to do business.
So why are Vivid leading the way? My guess is they want to exploit the market before something better (i.e. Apple) comes along, while being able to say to the people who make money shipping, packing, storing and selling discs ‘We’re trying to protect you’ when they know they’re not. While the DVD trade deceives itself into thinking HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will push back the internet and create a new age of disc sales, content owners know discs are dead already and are getting ready to eliminate them entirely.
March 19th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 29th, 2007
BLT (Blog Link Trade), the greatest plugin Wordpress never had, took another step towards one-point-oh! last week when Andreas of ‘Sex Drugs & Compiler Construction’ took up the gauntlet and fixed a couple of the problems previously mentioned here.
You can download his version of this little badass here.
With being able to ditch rejected trades and ’style’ the submission window the only big step between what we have and the spec I initially fantasized being ’skim’ – the ability to change the links on display depending on the origin of the reader (some documentation would also be great – I’ll write it just let me know the deets).
Then I started thinking.
Sugasm is a big manual link-trade. What if there was a way to automate some of its strong points and make BLT a networking too?
(Then I said goodbye to my friends and thought – four bottles of champagne and four people’s quite a lot actually. If ‘J’s’ driving and ‘A’ and ‘L’ didn’t finish their last glass I had… fuck I’m hammmmmer… I’m a hammer.)
So here’s the V2 spec for the plugin I dream (that’s not quite at V1 right now). Why is it worth mentioning? This change gives people like me a way of saying ‘thanks’ to whomever codes it in the form of cold-hard traffic.
Here’s what I’m thinking – BLT becomes the core of an informal network, where any ‘trade-request’ is transmitted to everyone that blogger is trading with simultaneously. I.e. is someone wants to trade with SugarBank, all my trade partners see an application from that blogger too.
If they accept the trade, the requesting blogger will be notified and given the chance to start sending traffic to the blogs that they’re now trading with. As BLT only shows links from blogs sending clicks if the requester doesn’t place a link or send any readers no problem, if they do, they get a chance to be exposed on a network of blogs they might not even have known existed.
I think this is pretty smart – but I’ve had a couple of bottles of champagne. If this ever gets built I will be accepting trades from whoever does it (as a minimum). If exposure’s any motivation – let me motivate.
A list of suggestions for improving our traffic trading plugin.
March 15th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 28th, 2007
BLT’s been handling link trades here (and on TGP.com now) since it appeared – almost magically – in response to a post I made.
(You don’t have to read that post but if you don’t – the rest of this is going to be really dull)
Now I’m torn. It’s a great piece of code which does a couple of unique things in an area where plug-ins are thin on the ground. Though I have the heart of a geeky little boy (it’s in a box by my bed) I’m not a programmer and so I now face with either leaving BLT as a beautiful experiment which never quite took flight (think Spruce Goose – huge potential) or I’m going to have to ask if there’s anyone out there who wants to pick up the gauntlet and move this thing on.
Guess which option I’ve picked. I dare you.
Some of you might be using BLT yourself and have your own ideas. Here are mine:
Add a way of deleting rejected applicants
Fix the sign-up form so that ‘Title’ and ‘URL’ fuck off disappear when the input boxes are selected
Allow the form and output to be styled with CSS
Optionally display clicks in and/or clicks out on each link
Enable ’skim’ so a tag can be used a URL which changes according to the origin of the visitor
Integrate the plugin with WP referrer spam tools
Allow links to persist until they’re clicked a set number of times (i.e. one click in, one click out)
Allow for certain links to get additional exposure (i.e. ‘return 120% of the clicks sent by this site’ to enable small blogs to make an impact on bigger ones)
With the above changes BLT would be a 1.0 product. With a couple of hundred bloggers using it we could change the face of blogrolls (okay – it’s not changing the face or communication but think about it… BLOGROLLS!) I think that’d be a good thing.
It means being able to build a blogroll that brings the most possible readers to you without having to guess how that might be done. As soon as you see a BLT enabled blog you’ll know that if you send a click to them they’ll try to send one back. To quote Humpty Hump – kiss me and I’ll kiss you back.
(Okay now I have to listen to ‘Masters of the P’)
If you’re qualified and interested – maybe we can build on the work Will at ‘Markia Exposed‘ has already done. As I said to will – if this becomes a fully formed plugin I’m happy to host the code here (and save you all the bandwidth).
How the language of pornography is losing its shock-value.
March 13th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 28th, 2007
Below are cover lines from two magazines aimed at men. While you read them try to guess if they’re from porn magazines or ‘mainstream’ titles.
Don’t worry – I’ll wait.
Magazine 1
Lisa Maffia – Good Girl Goes Bad and Takes off Clothes
Crappy Article – See Inside!
Can’t Get Laid? – You Now Can With Our Guide
Goth Holiday! – We Sent A Goth On Holiday
Meals On Heals – Meet the Guy Who Killed and Ate Prostitutes
Brittany Murphy – Is Great
Ron Jeremy – I Had Sex with an 87 Year Old for Cash
Joanna Kruppa!
Magazine 2
Anna Nicole Smith & Sophie Marceau Topless
Rob Zombie – The Devils Reject
Horror Sex – Bloodsucking Vamps on Film
Grad Antics at Cal State Northridge
UFO’s Are Real – And the US Government Knows It
Deep Inside Elvira – Said No To Elvis, Said Yes to…?
Top 10 Ways to Kill Yourself
How Credit Card Companies are F***king You!
Lindsey
If you guessed they’re from porn magazines you’re half right. If you guessed that the first set was from Maxim and the second from Hustler I’ll bet you’re one of those annoying people who claims they’d worked out ‘Rosebud’ was a sled five minutes into their first viewing of Citizen Kane.
Knowing their provenance reveals a couple of things.
There are better articles in Hustler than Maxim
The mainstream’s going porno.
For all the discussion of porn pushing into the mainstream, you could better argue that standards of sexual acceptability are changing now the first generation who grew up with video and the net (and thus had comparatively easy access to porn as teenagers) are in charge and the mainstream’s getting more pornographic.
Good news if you’re looking for mainstream acceptability as a way of increasing your audience as a pornographer or performer. The market’s coming to you (or over you – take your pick).
(NB: In the past day my internet connection’s been taking the kind of beating normally reserved for Yanni’s wife. If you’re trying to get hold of me I will return…)
March 1st, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 28th, 2007
When I suggested there was a gap in Wordpress the shape of a decent traffic-trading plugin I didn’t imagine that three days after writing a post I’d be testing a plugin written to my specifications.
Will, the man responsible for condensing my enthused ramblings into working code has done something truly extraordinary, and I’d like to help him out by stress-testing his work here.
The plugin – called BLT for Blog-Link-Trade (Will obviously has marketing chops to go along with his programming ones) – allows people to place a link to their site from any BLT enabled blog they visit by filling in a form.
BLT displays a link to the referring site each time it counts a visitor, meaning that a blog with BLT can have 100 link-trade partners, and only 5 visible outbound links if they choose. They need never worry about promoting a site that’s not promoting them because only people sending visitors show up in their recent referrers list. It’s awsome (and it seems extra awesome if you’re about a minute into “Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore: D. Con Safo” by The Mars Volta.) BLT can also produce a traditional referrer list, but has some significant additional sophistication (read this for more).
SugarBank is now BLT enabled, and if you sign up (at the base of the right hand menu you’ll see the form) we can find out how to make BLT better while you get a couple of clicks from SugarBank for taking part in the test. The hope is that a couple of other developers will help will tweak BLT into the kind of full-fat snack that’ll fatten up every blog that snarfs it down.
I’m not sure how many people can sign in to the version I’m running so be quick and remember you need to have a link here in order to show up.
(Henry Rollins is a really angry guy.)
It’s exciting to be involved in the genesis of something so useful (I was also involved in Genesis around ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ – long story). If you want to test BLT too – and when two sites both trade intelligently it gets really interesting – you can download the plugin here.
Don’t forget to worship Will. The man deserves his own cult. Where else can you download code and look at boobs simultaneously? (The last time I got this excited I was telling Sam Jackson about a script I’d just finished called ‘Snakes on a Plane‘)
(Controversy is one of Prince’s best albums. No doubt.)
Why isn't sharing traffic between blogs as easy and sophisticated as trading traffic between porn sites.
February 26th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 28th, 2007
The biggest adult websites in the world are among the biggest websites period. They got that way through crimeextortionstolen domains the refinement of traffic trading techniques, and that’s still site’s you’ve never heard of can see a million visitors a day, three times what Fleshbot – which is written about internationally – does.
Bloggers are very fond of trading traffic. We love to put up ‘blogrolls’ (which I hope you all realize is a riff on ‘bogroll’ – Brit slang for lavatory paper) listing who we read and respect. It’s the simplest, dumbest form of traffic exchange and I think it has to change. The clicks in and out aren’t measured, the presence of a link back to you isn’t checked automatically, and there’s no way to reward people who send the most people to you. It’s friendly to the point of idiocy unless you can be sure that your link partners are trustworthy and of equal size (traffic traders call these ‘hard’ links).
…it’s time for a Wordpress plugin to trade traffic intelligently and fairly. It’d make vastly more sense than a dumb ‘blogroll’ and could introduce millions of people to blogs they’d never have found otherwise – why has no one written one yet?
Jizz-Bizz webmasters have addressed all of these problems and using software, have added a great deal of science to link exchange. Classic porn-site traffic trades work like this:
Ivor Dong (sex-blogger) who’s got a big dick but a small blog, visits ‘WaddWorld’, a bigger sex-blog than Ivor’s, and fills in a form for ‘link exchanges’.
The form immediately checks the URL Ivor enters for a reciprocal link. If it finds one, he’s accepted into the exchange and WaddWorld starts counting the clicks Ivor sends.
WaddWorld only shows 50 links back to webmasters, but when Ivor’s sent enough clicks to show up in their chart, a link back to Ivor automatically appears at WaddWorld. If Ivor drops out of the top fifty in future, his link disappears.
Ivor is now receiving a stream of visitors from WaddWorld. In the meantime, he’s installed the same software as WaddWorld and joined a couple of other link exchanges.
The software treats visitors from WaddWorld in one of two ways, they all see Ivor’s blog, but the links they see to other sites differ depending on where they come from. Some links to Ivor’s other link exchanges, which enables him to send them enough visitors to start getting clicks back. Others see no links to partners at all and Ivor ’skims’ these visitors off and shows them links to his DVD store. The software is smart enough not to show visitors from WaddWorld links back to WaddWorld (Ivor doesn’t want that and WaddWorld doesn’t either).
By applying the send-receive-skim loop to a large number of sites, very significant quantities of traffic can be built up. Setting the ’skim’ low (or to zero) allows sites to ‘launder’ visitors from a number of websites, sending people from site A to site B and vice-versa. That allows a site to send more visitors to its partners than it’s getting itself.
(If this is confusing, imagine building a store between two malls. To get from one mall to the other people have to walk through your store. Each mall sees a stream of people leaving your store and coming into their mall, but you know 99% of those people weren’t headed for your store when they left home. You get credit for filling the mall, but in reality you’re just acting as an intermediary. It makes you money because many of the thousands of people walking through your store stop to buy your stuff).
It can be abused. If you skim more visitors than come to your site of their own accord, you’re leeching from everyone you link to. Worse still the ‘classic’ skim is to re-direct links, so someone who thinks their clicking on one thing, ends up somewhere entirely different – the type of abuse that got adult sites a bad name to begin with.
Done right however, smart trades are a brilliant tool, but one bloggers can’t easily use because trading software tends either to be expensive (hundreds of dollars) or ostensibly free and built to ’skim’ visitors for the benefit of the person who wrote the code. Even the expensive stuff doesn’t hook into blogs the way it should.
So it’s time for a Wordpress plugin to trade traffic intelligently and fairly. It’d make vastly more sense than a dumb ‘blogroll’ and could introduce millions of people to blogs they’d never have found otherwise – why has no one written one yet? (there’s this but I don’t trust it – could it be hacked into something better?)
I’d go as far to say a ’smart’ blogroll should be part of the standard Wordpress install. I’d love to be able to offer links from SugarBank to anyone whose blog I like, without having to commit to 500 outbound links, or linking to blogs than don’t link back.
Coders c’mon… let me know as soon as your ready (sometimes I wish I’d stuck with programming myself…) People want this.
February 24th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 28th, 2007
Yesterday I commented on the futility of trying to beg your way to riches via your blog. I was pooh-poohing. Bastard. Today I’m going to accentuate the positive and run down five business models I believe can work for (sex) blogs and we’ll see in increasing numbers this year.
Charged Archives What is it?: Placing blog archives in a member’s area where people have to pay for access to old content.
Who’s it good for?: Sex podcasters could do very well with this. The difference between their content and the stuff that’s traditionally used to fuel a pay-site is minimal. By keeping new shows free via RSS, the marketing for the locked archives is built in. It doesn’t hurt regular readers, your content remains free to anyone who grabs it when it’s new.
A softened version of this idea involves putting out a ‘decaf’ version of your content and then keeping the ‘caffeinated’ version for members only. It’s a far weaker implementation and not the version I’d recommend. I can’t see written content having enough appeal to make this work either (with a couple of rare exceptions).
Product Placement What is it?: Advertisers pay bloggers to include product names, images and references in their posts.
Who’s it good for?: Big mainstream blogs mostly. It’s a very low-return form of advertising, and only works for companies prepared to invest a lot in a brand. The downside is that being discovered doing this will make you appear ’sneaky’ in the eyes of many (don’t worry, they’ll be making less money than you.) This is happening already in a couple of blogs and, reading their comments, it’s clear the readers don’t know it’s happening. Are you sure that blogger you read really likes that record and isn’t just being paid to mention it in their sidebar? Couldn’t you go for a cool, refreshing Coke right now?
Offsite Advertising What is it?: Making money from selling ads on a website that’s not your blog. Your blog links to a network ‘hub’ that carries ads, you get a slice of the ad-revenue equivalent to the amount of traffic you send. Your blog stays ad-free, you get paid and you can sell ads you wouldn’t want seen on your blog.
Who’s it good for?: Almost everyone. The appeal of having an ‘ad-free’ blog and still making money from advertising is huge. It’s very easy to set up, and because a network of blogs can send more people to an ad than one blog alone, the bigger the network of sites involved, the more profitable the network becomes. Who said Sugasm? What!? Oh… that’s an idea…
Ad-extortion What is it?: You place ads on your blog, and then offer people the opportunity not to see them if they pay for a ‘clean’ version.
Who’s it good for?: Bloggers with large audiences but who aren’t successfully selling advertising. This model doesn’t use ads to sell, they’re placed as an annoyance and the more annoying they are, the more likely someone will pay to turn them off (assuming your content’s worth sticking around for). Porn consumers are generally prepared to put up with a lot, but I won’t be surprised to see one of the bigger adult-magazine-style blogs take a crack at this. Salon and IMDB have been doing this for years and if your content’s ‘essential’ it can work, particularly If you throw in a couple of enhanced features.
See, no pooh-poohing today, all positively (and yes – I am going to be rolling out a couple of blogs using these approaches myself). Now where’s that Coke?
World’s First Sex-Blog Network, SexNotWork, Announces 24hr Membership Application Window Starting February 20th
Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB), February 16 2006 — Today Sam Sugar announced that on Monday 20th February 2006, SexNotWork – the world’s first sex-blog network – will begin accepting membership applications from blogs, podcasts, and other RSS enabled sites with a sexual theme for a period of 24hrs. SexNotWork is a collaboration between Sugar, whose background is in mainstream magazine publishing and the adult industry – which he blogs at SugarBank, and Paul Scrivens, whose Whitespace blog propelled him onto the ‘A-list’, and is founder of the world’s largest blog network 9rules.
“SexNotWork is going to bring back all the fun, sophistication and quality to on-screen sex that Paris Hilton has drained out of it,” said Sugar. “We’re looking for bloggers who understand that networks are the best way to organically build links and traffic. Limiting the application window is a move that’s worked well in the past and will reward people who are as excited about SexNotWork as we are.”
SexNotWork will offer bloggers exposure and community, and enable advertisers to reach hundreds-of-thousands of readers, over many blogs, from a single point.
“Sex sells,” said Scrivens. “SexNotWork is going to connect smart, educated, sexy people with smart, educated, sexy blogs. We know that people interested in cars, politics and gossip, also like to read about sex. SexNotWork is the first network to make sexuality its central theme, and the first to assume sex curious people are as likely to read the New Yorker as the New York Post.”
SexNotWork will be in place by the end of February; Sugar and Scrivens are confident it will take its place among the top tier of blog networks.
“SexNotWork is capable of attracting more daily readers than any other blog network,” said Sugar. “Sexuality is an eternal part of human nature – why else are so many people in cave-paintings naked? Sex is our most fundamental drive, and unless it suddenly goes out of fashion, SexNotWork is guaranteed a sizeable audience. We want to change perceptions, promoting blogs which demonstrate that sexy needn’t mean stupid, erotic needn’t mean explicit and graphic needn’t mean gross.”
About SexNotWork: SexNotWork (http://sexnotwork.com) is the world’s first sex-blog network and is due to launch in late February 2006.
About Sam Sugar: Sam Sugar has worked in publishing, advertising, film, television and the adult industry. He’s a co-founder of SexNotWork and blogs at SugarBank (http://sugarbank.com).
About Paul Scrivens: Paul Scrivens is an A-List blogger and founder of the world’s largest blog network, 9rules (http://9rules.com). He’s a co-founder of SexNotWork and blogs at Whitespace (http://9rules.com/whitespace/).
Porn can learn what not to do from the worst of the mainstream.
February 12th, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 28th, 2007
Someone commenting on a blog thread about me this week (it’s too boring to link to) said “You’d have to be truly incompetent not to make money in porn,” strong evidence their only insight into the business of porn has been a church leaflet, but I remembered it when I came across a story which revealed that Netflix – the company who invented shipping an “unlimited” number of DVD’s to subscribers each month for a fixed fee – was deliberately slowing shipping to their most active customers. Shipping cost’s Netflix $.78 a disc, and they are trying to protect their profits.
Putting aside the fact that their business model has the life-expectancy of a Mayfly (Apple’s about to make movie downloading work – DVD’s will get iTune’d), why punish your best customers? Surely it’s better to lose some money on the people who think your service is great – who bring you more business via advocacy and referrals – than punish them for using your product to the point where your model breaks down? Their goodwill is what advertising and marketing try to create. Netflix is doing it’s best to eradicate it.
The adult industry’s often guilty of similar idiocy.
Good customers (or subscribers if you’re a blogger) are a rare commodity, worth pampering, fawning over and listening too. Worrying about losing $5 a on a customer it cost you $30 to acquire is retarded, whether you’re selling smut or shipping shit (I just saw “Prime” – my God Meryl, did you really need the money?). In the blogging world the equivalent of Netflix’s slow shipping is ignoring email, not responding to comments, or forgetting why people started reading you in the first place and talking about what you like on your pizza (pretty much everything, I’m easy).
When Netflix declares bankruptcy (two years? Three?) you’ll know where the rot started.
January 31st, 2006 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 28th, 2007
It’s hard for people outside the adult industry to get a sense of who the real players on the skinternet are. Forget Playboy, major magazines, hipster community sites, blogs or (heaven forbid) AJAX interfaces. The real action is, and always has been, free content sites.
TGP’s (Thumbmnail Gallery Posts) – sometimes referred to as link dumps – who provide links to the kind of pictures you normally only see at an FBI bachelor party, and make money from advertising websites who pay a bounty on each new customer they send.
One of the biggest TGP’s – ‘The Hun’ publishes its statistics for all to see. The numbers give a clear sense of just how large the market for sex is. With a single webpage, a design which dates to the late nineties, and a lot of smut, they’re consistently attracting 3 million unique visitors a day.
While it’s easy to laugh at the simplicity of ‘The Hun‘, or attribute their success to sex-content, it’s worth remembering how much competition they face, and that they managed to build a simple, easy to use, content driven site – without MBA’s – that’s been working, unchanged, since 1996. They are richer than you.
Investigate the numbers here. If you visit the site, don’t click on anything you might not be ready for.
December 18th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 27th, 2007
My post about tagging was understood and WTF’ed in equal measure. I was trying to use Technorati tags as an easy way to define ‘blog’ and then use them to comment on the state of sex blogging.
Some of you (and you know who you are you demanding, foxy, bitches) wanted to know more about tagging so here – on an eight mince pie day (I disgust myself and no Americans, mincemeat doesn’t contain any meat), here’s a little more on tagging.
Tags are categories. On their simplest level, tags are just categories, but unlike traditional categories, you can invent tags to suit each post you make, which allows you to make them post specific. Generally the more specific a tag is, the more useful it is (’Chunky Black Asses’ is more useful than just ‘Chunky Asses’, especially when you’re looking for video clips of Nubian butt.)
Tags help search engines. Tags are metadata, which is the way self-important undergraduates say information about information (if my collection of ‘Mini Muffs and Mighty Men’ magazines is data, that I collect dwarf porn is the metadata). That means if you write something funny, but don’t use the word funny, but then tag it funny, someone typing ‘funny’ into a search engine has a hope in hell of finding it. They also free you up from feeling you have to SEX! litter your PORN! posts with FUCKING! keywords.
Tags can be internal or external. This is where I lost a few people last time. Don’t worry, I’ve really explained this already (reading this is like having sex with me. By the time we’re discussing what you want to object to, I’ve done it and you’re smiling.) Tags can either be written to help users find content – internal tags (SugarBank’s an example. Those tags on the far right are for you), or they can be written to satisfy search engines – external tags.
For example, though technically everything at SugarBank concerns sex and porn, I don’t tag every post that way because doing so would make it harder for people to find posts about sex and porn specifically. What I’m calling external tagging is aimed at letting people know about what’s in your blog before they visit it, while internal tags are aimed at guiding people through your blog.
(You can tag for internal and external use simultaneously, by hiding the external tags from visitors so they don’t get in the way. The best of both worlds, as they say at the Ping-Pong bar in Sydney.)
Tags are easy. Okay, that’s a lie – adding tags to a website from scratch would be a nightmare, but most blogging systems offer easy ways to add tags, and many add categories as tags automatically.
Tags are newsworthy. Technorati, de.lico.us and many other similar sites help people navigate the web by organizing websites using tags. If you tag in a way those sites will understand, they’ll add you to their index, providing a free, targeted, incoming link to content people are looking for. A reliable alternative to fellating the Googlebot.
So although tagging won’t make you famous, shoot your blog to the top of Google, or make your bits any bigger (I measure every day), it will make your blog easier to find, navigate and read – in my view, well worth doing.
December 7th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 27th, 2007
Since launching SugarBank I’ve spent a considerable amount of time wondering where all the sex blogs are. Unlike the mainstream web which is saturated with good, bad and what-the-fuck-is-that porn (remember when the web was just porn and X10 camera pop-under ads? – the good old days…), the adult blog space seems a little weak. One major networked sex blog, a few huge TGP’s pretending to be blogs and a lot of lovingly handcrafted small sites seem to be all there is on offer. When I asked for recommendations earlier this week, people responded with all the enthusiasm of Nascar fans at an R. Kelly concert.
As I’m really only useful when I know what I’m talking about (or am completely naked ladies), I decided to investigate, and find out if the lack of sex(y) blogs was real or imagined.
I started by visiting Technorati. For all their flaws they do as good a job as anyone at providing a rough snapshot of what’s happening in the blog space. I looked up ten popular tags, and counted how many blogs were listed in each case:
The first interesting point is that Tags like ‘Gadgets’ which are very thoroughly and professionally blogged pull comparitively few blogs, likewise sex related tags aren’t used that often. Based on this it appears that the sex business doesn’t yet know the difference (wait for it) between its (WAIT for it) RSS and it’s elbow (YES! YES! Pure gold. Damn I’m funny.) Another conclusion might be that sex bloggers don’t tag, but in that case, we can assume as many sex-bloggers ignore their tags as those in the mainstram, and still make comparisons between categories. The other alternative is that there’s been a cooling effect, where the big blogs are so effectively dominating a niche that they’ve killed competition Google-Mart style.
I then looked at each tag in more detail. Technorati ranks blogs based on the number of incoming links from other blogs they have, counting the number of individual blogs linking as of primary importance, and the number of total links after that. I.e. ten links from ten different blogs means more to Technorati than ten (or twenty) links from the same blog – but Technorati does consider both numbers.
For each tag, I looked at the 20 blogs with the most links, and counted the number of linking blogs. Plotting the number of links against each blog results in a line which tells us more about what’s going on in each area of interest:
(click to enlarge)
I then did the same thing with the sex-related tags:
(click to enlarge)
In the graphs above, the area under each line represents the amount of activity in each category, while the shape of each line shows how strong the top blogs in each category are relative to each other.
‘Gadgets’ and ‘Blogs’ are both tags which the graph reveals are dominated by large blogs (Engadget and BoinBong in this case) which absorb the majority of links in the areas they cover. Conversely ‘Politics’ isn’t a tag dominated by any single blog, containing a large number of very strong blogs, all of whom share the link love reasonably evenly.
Of course, what’s most interesting to us is the weakness of the sex tags. Based on this graph it appears that the adult market, arguably the most profitable online, isn’t being actively contested. Despite thousands of companies, many of them with millions of dollars to spend, with a foot in the industry, sex tags appear to be underutilized.
Fleshbot is currently the market leading sex-blog (probably followed by Erosblog – which may get more pageviews but isn’t formally networked and has a lower profile), and many babelogs get the kind of traffic most mainstream websites find hard to process (millions of pageviews a day). Could they be having a cooling effect and be responsible for the low use of sex tags? Not unless Technorati is blind to the biggest blogs in the marketplace, and that could only happen if they’re choosing not be listed (Fleshbot?) or not using tags.
The point is RSS has changed the rules. Powerful websites were good at attracting raw traffic, but dominating in the blog space, and attracting the high-quality visitors who choose to subscribe to what you have to say, means being good at generating links-in. Right now, the sex arena (which is where I sometimes play nice, and other times rough ladies), is still wide open. Due to choice, error or ignorance, the biggest sex-blogs are still thinking like websites.
What’s the upshot of this brief analysis?
If you think you’ve ‘missed out’ on the porn boom, these numbers should give you pause for thought, in the blog space – things have only just begun.
The number of blogs that link to you matters (which is where the bloggasm can make a big difference. Links from small blogs carry equal weight to links from large blogs within Technorati, so the size of the blogs linking to you isn’t that important.)
If you’re not tagging you’re missing out on a lot of interest. People looking for sex-based content using tags don’t have much to choose from right now.
November 20th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 26th, 2007
In the past four installments I’ve explained a few ideas – in summary:
You can build relationships with people by ‘kissing’ them as often as possible. A kiss is a small gift you can afford to give anyone without thinking.
When you know who your likely customers are, you can sell your product most easily by giving it away, no strings attached, to people who seem interested. You do this by giving them a candlestick. Something of real value which allows them to experience what you’re selling, with minimal limitations, and then trusting the quality of your product, and the implicit contract formed by accepting a gift, to turn curious people into customers.
You encourage good behaviour by expecting it, leading by example and leaving the honest majority free of navigating the hoops and hurdles normally erected to repel the exploitative few.
What are kisses? They require no signing-up, registration, logging-in, form filling or payment details.
Examples:
iTunes free music Tuesdays
Seth Godin’s eBook ‘Knock Knock’
Starbucks free coffee shots
What are candlesticks? They have real value, they’re only given to people who are potential customers, they are given without expectation, they are the thing you’re trying to sell, they make the recipient feel special. They’re a really big kiss, and equally free of unnecessary restrictions.
Examples:
Seth Godins eBook ‘Unleashing The Ideavirus’
Hugh’s Stormhoek wine givaway
A free book for every blogger
All sales and marketing starts by giving things away, information, items, products or ideas. Kisses and Candlesticks marketing is a way of refining that process to allow good products to sell themselves (which is a lot easier than selling them yourself).
Kisses create goodwill, stimulating interest in what you do and opening people to the message you’re trying to send. Candlesticks demonstrate trust, and give people enough experience with your proposition for them to make confident decisions. You encourage good behaviour by expecting it, leading by example and leaving the honest majority free of navigating the hoops and hurdles normally erected to repel the exploitative few. The respect this demonstrates further encourages people to trust and respect you.
By focusing on giving people the best chance to understand and experience what you do, you create the easiest path to a sale. Without sales-talk, bluster or showmanship you’re making the ultimate offer from someone who knows what they have is worthwhile. Try it for yourself, you’ll like it. Kisses and Candlesticks is about removing the catches.
November 18th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 26th, 2007
Some people, and I once numbered among them, don’t believe that anything as simple and trusting as the Kisses and Candlesticks idea can work. They assume that people’s natural inclination is to steal, cheat and exploit (I think these people have a political party.)
Understanding why that analysis is wrong requires a curious mix of faith in humanity and rank cynicism.
The cynicism is easy. Some people will exploit, cheat and steal. They’re doing it now and will continue to. Creating negative consequences for their actions won’t work (which is one reason why you’re more likely to go to prison if a relative has, if consequences changed behavior prison would work as a deterrent, it doesn’t) Assuming people are dishonest just inconveniences honest people. Look at a line of people being frisked before they get on a plane for evidence of perfectly polite people getting perfectly pissy in response to perfectly pragmatic precautions.
As for faith in humanity, as long as good people vastly outnumber the bad, kisses and candlesticks marketing should easily overwhelm the limited exploitation of a few bad apples, with the positive response of your average, everyday nice person. Showing people trust, respect and honesty generates positive feelings, engenders communication and allows you to lead by example (or as that book says ‘Do unto others…’) Trust works.
November 17th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 26th, 2007
The idea of Kisses and Candlesticks divides the things we give away into two groups:
Kisses – low cost (to the giver), high-value (to the receiver) items, which demonstrate friendship and affection. They’re given without expectation to almost anyone.
Candlesticks – high value (to giver and receiver) items, which are given in the hope that the recipient will be inspired to act in a way that will please the giver
My old bosses ‘everyone gets a day’s free membership’ idea was a candlestick. It would have removed any barriers stopping curious potential customers from trying her website, and trusted them not to exploit their limited access to download her entire archive (a safe assumption – most people are honest, and those who aren’t were never going to become good customers anyway).
…anything which demonstrates you want to insure yourself against loss works against the idea of giving something away.
By answering the ‘will I like what I see?’ question, the unlimited free trial would have made curious surfers into paying customers much easier than it was while trying to simultaneously guard and share the content.
At the time we’d already got some of our marketing right. We were ‘kissing’ everyone who came to the website by sharing a limited, constantly updated, selection of video clips, photosets and samples.
Unfortunately kisses don’t provide enough substance for many people to make a firm choice with, and candlesticks are too valuable to give to everyone, everyday. What we should have done is offered the free access once every quarter and kissed anyone who stopped by in between.
So isn’t this already common practice all over the web and everywhere else for that matter?
No. A kiss isn’t a kiss if you have to enter your email address to receive it. A candlestick that comes with paperwork doesn’t demonstrate much trust. Gifts are only free if the recipient trades nothing in return for the item they receive.
Trading information is the most obvious pollution of kisses and candlesticks marketing, but anything which demonstrates you want to insure yourself against loss works against the idea of giving something away. It turns a gift into a transaction and, in those cases, the more lopsided the deal, the more likely the recipient will think that the information they’ve exchanged will be exploited in some way they can’t imagine in order to equalize things.
E.g. If a link appeared on the Rolls-Royce website which said ‘Drive a Rolls Royce for a week! Unlimited miles! Free Gas!’, backed up by a form asking you for a name, address, social security number and credit card info, most people will stop thinking they’re going to drive a car worth more than a small apartment, and start thinking about ‘the catch’ – even if none exists. The power of a truly newsworthy promotion has been instantly polluted with the unmistakable whiff of scam. So you might still go for the ride in the Roller but a lot of people would see the forms and run away.
Giveaways don’t work when nothing’s really being given away. Bartering isn’t free. Kisses and candlesticks are given without conditions.
November 16th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 26th, 2007
I formulated the basic structure of the Kisses and Candlesticks idea in London.
I was with a stunning American woman I’d last seen in Los Angeles. We had dined at Gordon Ramsey and were on our way to see Les Misérables (note to the ladies – an evening with the Sugarman is always five-star). She looked stunning, and by the time we were faced with a vast pile of petit fours, the urge to scream ‘check out this six-foot Californian bombshell with the degrees – she’s with me and we might have sex later!’ was significant. My good taste in friends was confirmed when, as soon as she left our taxi for the theatre, our driver did that ‘if I were younger/is she a model/treat her right/nice tits’ thing.
When I caught up with her in the theatre lobby I was overwhelmed with a desire to show her how much I was enjoying our evening, pulled her close to me and kissed her cheek (note to the ladies – the Sugarman is a gentleman).
I clearly surprised her. She pulled back from me an inch and looked me straight in the eye. Her eyes were huge but told me nothing at all but, after enough seconds had passed for me to feel a bead of sweat form on my back, she cracked a smile brilliant enough to melt rock. That was my first realization, the power of kisses:
We give small tokens of affection to people we care about. Kisses, hugs, kind words, smiles. They show that we care and encourage the people who receive them to like the person giving them more. Their cost to the giver is immeasurable, as is the positive effect they have on the recipient.
The second realization came during the first act of Les Misérables. In the story our hero steals silver from a priest who has kindly taken him in. He is apprehended and brought before the priest. Surprisingly (and this is the crux of the story so – very minor spoiler warning I guess) the priest doesn’t press charges, but tells the police the stolen items, silver candlesticks, were in fact a gift. The priest then gives the thief even more valuable items, telling him he has bought his soul for God, and that he must now vow to change his ways.
What I realized was this:
Accepting a gift seals a contract between giver and receiver. The contract says:
‘In return for this, I hope you will…’
This is universally true. Even a gift for a child is given in the hope you’ll be remembered in years to come. The strength of the contract a gift represents, and the likelihood the recipient will honor it, depends on the amount of goodwill the gift-giver has shown in forming it, i.e. the greater the value of the gift to the giver, and thus the more faith they show in giving it away, the stronger the bond of trust the gift represents. Good gifts, form strong contracts which recipients honor.
November 15th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 26th, 2007
I once made a mistake.
(Unbelievable I know. Still with me?)
I was working with a large subscription adult website. The kind of operation that looks as if it’s run by a model out of her apartment, but in fact employs full-time legal counsel, offers services to other web companies, and provides good medical for a few hundred Californians.
Subscriber numbers had been level for a while, and the company founder was keen to try a stunt she’d profited from in the past. I was charged with boosting business and felt responsible for any potential mistakes. The apparent riskiness of her idea terrified me and so, fearfully, I squashed it flat.
She wanted to give everyone visiting the website one day of free and unrestricted access to her subscription members area. No forms to fill out, credit card information to exchange or promises to keep. Just give it all away to anyone who wandered by for 24hrs.
As new ways to pay for things emerge, the ability to give things away profitably will become increasingly important.
It seemed crazy for a number of reasons.
A deluge of new visitors might offset any additional sales by pushing our, already significant, bandwidth bills into the troposphere.
Potential subscribers might use their free membership to download everything they wanted to see at once, delaying them joining the site for weeks, and perhaps forever.
From that point on, a portion of subscribers might choose to wait for another free offer, even if none was promised, rather than ‘risk’ paying for a subscription.
My reasoning was sound enough to convince her she was wrong. Despite giving things away being the second oldest marketing technique known to man, I didn’t see how it could work on such a scale. I knew I could use samples to drive interest, but this wasn’t a sample, this was the very thing I was trying to sell, in whole, for 24hrs. It was too ripe for exploitation to seem sane.
(NB: The oldest marketing technique known to man is advertising, an off-shoot of the oldest profession, whose foremost exponents never give anything away).
Now I know why I was wrong, and think what I’ve learned working that out is worth sharing. The timing couldn’t be better. Information that used to be sold in books is now being published online without charge, and the ‘market of free’ is exploding. The only way many people think to get paid for their efforts is via advertising – I disagree (and did so publicly).
As new ways to pay for things emerge, the ability to give things away profitably will become increasingly important. The market will be split into those who can give things away profitably, and those who don’t know how and decide to stop sharing altogether.
If you have anything to sell this is a short series of posts about giving it away for free, so well, that you wind up rich.
Bored with Jenna? The media and this new blog aren't.
November 6th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 25th, 2007
Jenna Jameson.
You should check out Jenna Fatigue – a blog devoted to cataloguing every appearance of Jenna Jameson in the public eye. It’s funny, an interesting study in the media’s (and Jenna’s) exploitation of porn, and it might be the cleverest piece of stealth marketing Vivid/ClubJenna’s come up with yet…
Promise to read this book and I'll send you a copy. Free.
November 2nd, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 25th, 2007
A few days ago I mentioned my friend, Craig Clevenger’s, new book and encouraged you to seek it out. A few trusting souls did, and today I received my first email from someone who’d found the book via this blog. One new reader – job done.
My wheels have been turning. In years of meetings with ‘mainstream’ companies, the recurring theme has been a desire to reach an audience of people interested in sex, dissuaded by fears of reprisal (”Sugar – how dare you suggest people who buy SUV’s/live in Washington/go to movies visit pornographic websites!”) It would be a good thing for the general acceptance of sexuality, and the bottom line of websites like this, if sex wasn’t assumed to be of interest only to idiots, perverts and weirdoes.
So why don’t we prove that assumption wrong?
(NB: I am an idiot, weirdo-pervert, but can’t be held up as an example of normality.)
If you run a blog on any topic, and it’s been going a couple of months, email me your URL, name, and address, and I’ll send you a free copy of Craig’s first book ‘The Contortionists Handbook’. You don’t have to promise to write about it or, if you do, say anything other than what you feel. I think the quality of his writing will speak for itself. I just want you to read the book.
Hardback copies of Craig’s new book Dermaphoria are expensive, so I’ll share any I can scrounge with bloggers who love ‘The Contortionists Handbook‘, and ask Craig to sign copies bought by bloggers who I can’t get a freebie for.
Can a few free paperbacks change the way the publishing industry (and the mainstream media) thinks about people who read sex-blogs?
If I’m right in my thinking, I can add a few bloggers to the unofficial ‘Craig Clevenger Fanclub’ and, while my endorsement doesn’t mean much, the endorsement of a group of us might. We could help win Craig a seat on the Amazon bestseller list and change the pre-conceptions of the entire publishing industry. We might just find something cool to share with our readers. It’s all worthwhile because you can’t keep good down.
I’m sorry we can’t afford send free books to non-bloggers but, if there’s sufficient demand for copies, I’ll arrange a bulk purchase and get Craig to sign them. (I’ll ask about this again when there are more bloggers on-board and we can make the same offer to all our readers simultaneously.)
I’m doing the legwork on this for free and the books are being funded by Craig himself. My reward is helping one friend get noticed and helping many friends with something good to read and a little potential blog fodder.
Craig can be our guy so, when the movie of his first book comes out, you’ll be able to casually refer to him as ‘…a guy I know,’ like I do. (Actually don’t do that, dropping names will make you sound like a wanker – trust me, people tell me all the time.)
Can a few free paperbacks change the way the publishing industry (and the mainstream media) thinks about people who read sex-blogs? Can a great writer compete with the traditional marketing establishment thanks to the aid of a few enthusiastic bloggers? Will you think the sex scene in Dermaphoria is as hot and edgy as the gorgeous woman I was discussing the book with yesterday? Let’s find out…
Bella online entices readers with the subtle promise of animal sex.
October 6th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 21st, 2007
On your first day of webmaster academy they tell you it’s easy to attract web traffic by talking about sex. They tell you that you don’t have to be positive about sex, as long as you use keywords that’ll raise eyebrows any mention of the ’s’ word will work just fine.
Once you’ve tasted the sweet deluge of attention you can get from suckling Google’s filth faucet (safesearch off!) it’s easy to get addicted and rookie webmasters often consider discussing tiny extreme-sex niches – totally out of context – hoping to draw freaks to their door by placing phrases like ‘Animal Rape’ and ‘puppy’ in the same sentence.
Which brings me to this – which is either the most out of place article on the web, or is the most cynical marketing ploy I’ve ever seen.
Animal Life (from ‘Bella Online – the voice of women who need to be reminded not to fuck animals‘)
September 29th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 20th, 2007
I get a steady stream of income from people asking me how to turn their idea into a website, or their website into a source of income. Some of there people clearly haven’t read what I’ve blogged on this previously and in those cases I steal their identity, posts requests for child-porn on Craigslist, and wait for justice to be done.
In other cases I say the same thing over and over. For free. It sucks, and for that reason – I’m sharing it with you here.
For people taking pictures, the fastest route to cash is building a subscription website. This will change with the launch of SugarBank phase 2 – Metatron.
For bloggers ads are normally the answer. Problem is Google’s adsense program isn’t very fond of porn, and even if your site’s not explicit (like this one) their keyword algorithm will find trouble fitting ads to your posts unless you’ve named your breasts ‘digital’ and ‘camera’ or you testes ‘mortgage’ and ‘loan’.
A better bet is Adbrite. Their programs are similar to Google’s with the advantage that their porn-friendly and open about how much they’re paying you (Google – amazingly – just pay you ’something’ and won’t say precisely how much per click).
Even if you can get into adsense, the lack of relevant ads will depress your income. Adbrite won’t, they do have relevant ads, and any blogger can create a revenue stream without having to sell space on their site by inserting a few lines of code.
Disclaimer: If you click on the link below I will be paid a small bounty if you sign up. It’s good for me, won’t effect you and doesn’t change my feelings about the service one iota.
September 29th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 20th, 2007
For years I’ve been jotting down phrases I’d like to see on T-Shirts for some future online sales project. I’m thinking the time is now (inspired by Ms. Kitka’s desire to buy some porn-friendly merchandise and her offer of free modeling). I don’t imagine it’ll be big business, I just want the stuff for me and anyone else who thinks they’re worth putting on.
The design bit’s easy, but does anyone know of manufacturing alternatives to the ubiquitous Cafepress? I’d ideally like to get a few T-Shirts and a couple of bikini’s silk-screened (the bikini’s sound mad I know – but I have a design I’m sure people will want to buy and I want to see more people in bikinis damnit. I think about it all the time.)
I don’t mind a little expense, but have no desire to place large advance orders before I know if anyone’s interested. Obviously – as soon as I publicize the design’s I’ll be ripped off – so I’d prefer to just get stuck in. A single item is enough to start with, as long as orders can be filled after that. Any ideas? I’m very willing to partner with anyone who can help too. Free product will go to anyone making winning recommendations.
If on the other hand you would never buy a T-Shirt or anything else from SugarBank let me know that too…
Is a blog worth anything or are ads inevitable everywhere?
September 22nd, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 20th, 2007
Relatively speaking (which is the greatest non-made porn movie title I’ve come up with today) gas prices in the United States are the highest they’ve ever been. On average, US consumers are looking at $3 or more a gallon (stop laughing non-US readers), even adjusted for inflation, the last time gas was this expensive Ronald Regan was forgetting things and taking regular naps.
In the UK right now (which is where I am currently, in case my talentless stalkers have lost track) gas is $7 a gallon. Kicker is – American’s are screaming about crazy prices and the Brits aren’t (the Brits still aren’t flossing either.)
Why the difference? In America prices have risen 30-50% in the past year, and in the UK they haven’t (plus better floss, that lubricated tape’s awesome.)
People don’t react to the value of what they buy, as much as they react to changes. The bigger the change, the more violent the reaction.
In a world where paysites are losing ground to blogs, how will people react to the rise of blogs that look beyond advertising as a source of revenue? A change in price from zero is effectively infinite, and guaranteed to be objected to. How much is a blog feed worth? $20 a month? $20 a year? Nothing at all?
The number of people reading your RSS feed is going to become a more important measure of your online audience than the number of people who see your website, but without a universal micropayment system are ads the only way to make money?
I’d rather pay a small amount for the things I want than tolerate ads, but when some of your favorite blogs start looking for ways to raise revenue beyond advertising what will you do, and what will that do to the business of blogging?
September 15th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 20th, 2007
Seth Godin’s made the follow-up to his last e-book ‘Knock Knock‘ (which I mentioned a few posts back) available for download.
This time he’s applied the contents of his bald noggin to blogging. What he’s come-up with is essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand how to use blogs to their advantage. If you’re in marketing this is material worth taking the phone off the hook for and, at a cost of free, you’d have to be willfully ignorant to avoid it.
Why text ads make more sense than graphics and flash.
September 12th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 20th, 2007
A few days ago I received the following email:
I wonder if you might blog a little bit sometime soon about ad sizes. For those of out there that are trying to make a little $$$ on our ego-fueled, vanity blogs, it’d help if some of the affiliate programs out there gravitated to some of the more popular IAB sizes (http://www.iab.net/standards/adunits.asp) that are out there. I just signed up with another affil(sic) program, and behold another set of quite ignorable 468s.
The 468×60 ad standard is dead. We’re all conditioned by now to ignore it.
I’d love it if more webmasters (and how I hate THAT word…but that’s another rant) adopted ad sizes like 728×90, 300×250, and 160×600, instead of keeping that dreaded 468 around (or 234–even worse). Anyhoo…just thought I’d send you an email, and potential blog fodder. I suppose the theme would be how webmasters (ugh) and marketers need to catch up. Take a look at Yahoo news or sports and try to find a 468.
Thoughts…?
I would have been more flattered to have been asked about this fall’s trends in men’s designer labels, but I guess it’s my fault for spending all my time here talking about the jizz-bizz.
The Jurassic 468×60 standard has been out of common professional use for years now. My guess is that it persists due to laziness and habit. Too many sites have built spaces like that into their layouts and are reluctant to change. Too many webmasters (I hate the word too – what the fuck are you master of you fat geek fuck?), too many keyboard-bitches (that’s better) haven’t embraced database publishing. Their static sites are hard to change and, as bovine followers, they will remain content until it’s time to jump on the next bandwagon.
Would IAB sizes work better? Perhaps. I’m with Hugh though – advertising’s dead. People looking for affiliate promotion need endorsements, not ad space.
In a world of blogs, bloggers need stuff to talk about. If that’s your product it’ll provide better promotion than any advert ever could. Every favorable comment is an endorsement and endorsements sell products – it’s the basis of the magazine industry (otherwise GM would simply publish ‘GM Cars Monthly’ and not bother with Motor Trend etc.)
E.g. – Whay not check out this blog, nothing to do with sex but it makes me laugh almost every day.
In 2005 websites are as important as magazines were ten years ago and bloggers have the endorsements you need. Give your product away to bloggers who can say nice things about it and go from there.
(If you don’t have a product people rave about – go back to the drawing board. Selling crap’s too much work.)
If you must advertise, do it the smart way. Ads work best if they’re ‘honest’. Ever been in a Kiehls? They sell soap – packaged as if they got labels off an inkjet and stuck them on in the back room. This makes you think:
I must only be paying for the product because it’s clear these guys don’t care about packaging.
These guys aren’t some big multinational so I can trust what they’re telling me (e.g. Each soap is hand blended by master artisans…)
It’s really nice soap but it costs $24 a bottle. They sell a lot because of smart advertising. Advertising that doesn’t feel like advertising.
The only ads worth bothering with now are text. Short, direct, devoid of any marketing ‘flash’. Which are you more likely to click?
People are used to using search engines and trusting their results. Ads that read like search results stand a chance of being trusted. Conversely, the more obvious your ad, the less effective it’s going to be.
Forget IAB, forget graphics and forget ads (if you can). Let samples and endorsements spread word of your product and then let quality do the selling for you. If your trying to sell someone elses product – build trust with your audience and then either give it away or give an honest, positive opinion of it.
September 11th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 20th, 2007
Ms. Kitka
Ms. Kitka, SugarBank’s very own comment fox, is also a sex-blogger and nascent marketing genius.
She let me know about her recent change of URL by uncovering a lickable slab of her torso, writing the SugarBank URL on her belly in lip gloss, and then emailing me the picture you see above.
Totally got my attention.
I get to post a picture to the blog which features uncovered hotness, she gives me an excuse to say that – despite from the obvious, the best reason for reading Ms. Kitka’s Red Chronicle is her smart, snappy take on focused sexual obsession from the Democratic Republic of North America (which is what I’ll call Canada until America is less deserving of the soubriquet ‘Jesusland’).
Oh yeah – and she’s about to start video-blogging in her lingerie. Befriend her before she’s too famous to talk to you.
September 8th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 20th, 2007
Last weekend, exactly two months after it launched, PSP Porn received its millionth page view. Significant because it was done without any advertising and, contrary to what you might think, it’s not a domain that receives a lot of type-in traffic yet.
It would be easy for me to use this achievement as an opportunity to boast of my marketing ability, design skill and almost awkwardly large penis.
Yep – it’s a biggie.
However it’s probably more useful to you for me to share the tactics behind what I did with the site so that you can enjoy similar success. So…
Know your niche. When I launched PSP Porn I knew that I wanted it to be a babelog. Before I did any designing or made any plans I spent months looking at other babelogs learning from what I saw. It meant that at launch, I could be confident I hadn’t made any choices which would confuse users and make the site less likely to catch on. I often see websites which have made ’strange’ decisions as they attempt to fix problems which already have well established solutions. It’s easy to avoid.
Steal (almost) everything. PSP Porn has only one original idea (images formatted to fit the PSP ready for download). Every other aspect of the blog can be found in a thousand other places. It’s idiotic to copy a website and expect anyone to care. It’s brilliant to clone the best of what you see and then add a single differentiating feature. (It’s called ‘triangulation’ and is how modern politicians get elected – saying whatever the public wants to hear about most things, and making a ’stand’ on specific issues to create the impression they’re different and principled).
Give it all away. Since launching PSP Porn I’ve not made a dime from it. I intend to, but knew that worrying about how to make money at the start would stand in the way of making the blog a great place to visit. It’s far easier to convince an audience to pay for what they’re enjoying, than to find an audience when you have a product to sell. It’s why street performers ask you for money at the end of their act, not before they’ve done anything.
Pimp yourself. Use every appropriate opportunity to remind people of your website. If you get it wrong, and mention it when people aren’t interested, you’ll actively turn people off. If you ensure every platform you have can provide a link back to your site, you’ll give people the best chance to discover what you’re doing. That’s why all my blogs link to PSP Porn, except Podnography which isn’t a place I expect to find people interested in a softcore babelog. and therefore doesn’t.
Listen. When you launch a website you’ll get feedback immediately. Some of it’s easy to understand, like email, other stuff requires more skill – like log reports. All of it tells you how people are responding to your site and what they want. Every day I track which photosets people are looking at, and which models people are searching for. I use that feedback to make the site increasingly effective as time goes by.
So there you have it. How to make something out of nothing with only determination, sweat and a few gigabytes of scans of hot women you’re friendly with. It’s the American dream…
Download a free eBook on building websites by Seth Godin.
September 6th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 20th, 2007
Seth Godin has one of the best minds in business. If you’ve not read his books (which are mostly bestsellers) someone doing better than you probably has. You can check out his ouvre here.
Seth’s smart enough to know that nothing sells like ‘Free’, so he’s giving away his last eBook ‘Knock, Knock‘ to anyone who can be bothered to download it. If you have a website, and you want it to be better, read it. He knows a lot more than me about a lot of stuff and writes well too (I could take him in a knife fight though – it’s all about hand-speed and that’s what I’ve got.)
Humor never fails to find an audience regardless of what you're trying to sell.
August 30th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 19th, 2007
Ever wonder why every blog you read regularly is funny?
I was sent this (old?) joke from London this morning. It made me smile but that’s not impressive, I laugh at people walking into things (”So… funny… hurts…”)
I’m guessing that about 50% of people reading this have seen this joke already. They’ll consider it an ‘old’ joke (as if there are any new ones…) and not share it with their friends. Among those who haven’t seen this joke before and find it amusing, a significant proportion will pass it on to someone else (as I’m doing now).
The only thing that spreads virally as fast as jokes is news of disasters (and cold-sores at porn conventions). If your options for spreading ideas quickly are comedy and tragedy which will you choose? If you’re not using comedy to ignite interest in what you’re doing – why not? Are you more likely to tell a friend a great joke you heard or about a great chance to win an iPod?
Every time you amuse someone you give them a compelling reason to refer people to you. If you’re selling porn, which isn’t freely transmissable due to people’s reluctance to email adult material to friends offices and homes, how can you use humor to provide your site with truly viral content?
Distributing DVDs costs more than producing them, another reason downloads make more sense than discs.
August 20th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 19th, 2007
In my last post on this subject I explained that consumers want to download video content and use it without restrictions. In this final installment I’ll describe the online model which is already replacing DVD’s and, in doing so, is making disc based delivery irrelevant.
Imagine you could go to the HBO website and pay to download TV shows from the web at better than DVD quality. You could choose the quality of video you wanted to buy, depending on where you planned to watch it and the kind of equipment you had. You could pay more for extras or even buy scenes at random.
When new video compression and sound technologies appear you could take advantage of them with a software update. The same software could convert formats, so playback systems which can’t be upgraded would be able to access files they could understand.
You’d never have to worry about things being out of stock, and digital delivery would be finished before Fed-Ex could get a box to your house. Obviously, you wouldn’t have to pay a dime for shipping.
The content you downloaded would be totally unrestricted. You could copy it to as many devices as you like and your access to it would never expire.
Kids want to watch Finding Nemo at a friends house? Download it, store it to the drive in your phone, stream it to the TV and let them finish watching it in the car on the drive home.
Unlike Hollywood, the Sticky Valley isn’t tied down by lobbying cardboard manufacturers and ancient CEO’s who are still upset that VHS tapes don’t spontaneously melt down after three plays.
Content sellers won’t have to choose what to make available for sale, the cost of encoding files is so low putting their entire archive online becomes viable. As soon as they do this they tap into the profits hidden in the long tail.
They have no stock to produce, pack, ship, insure, process or return. Replication costs are zero and using peer-to-peer distribution means delivery costs are effectively zero too.
Pricing can be changed on the fly and, thanks to other savings, can undercut DVD’s without effecting margins. New releases can be made available worldwide without any delay, and the demands of the market can be responded to as fast as content can be produced because the time to market is so short.
There’s no complex copy-protection system to maintain because there’s no copy protection. People can do what they want with the content they buy – they’re going to anyway, most people are trustworthy and the untrustworthy ones will break whatever protection you try to apply. Theft isn’t a significant problem because low prices, service and convenience make buying easier than stealing.
This is a model which is already here.
Anyone with a computer can now download copies of TV shows for free which have better picture quality than store-bought DVD’s. File-sharing networks deliver more content than any legal alternative, and their users are also the people who spend most money on content.
Right now, unregulated collaboration online serves consumers of TV shows better than the corporations who make TV, who refuse to embrace online distribution, and are waiting for formats designed to make money for hardware companies. The best source of HDTV programming isn’t the networks, it’s Bittorrent.
The public wants DRM-free, online distribution so badly they’re prepared to put up with patchy quality, flaky search capabilities and zero customer support. It’s a model so good that Microsoft and Apple have already declared it’s where they see the future.
Microsoft’s Xbox 360 will ship with a plain old DVD drive and the ability to connect to the web. They know that you’re going to be downloading content straight to the unit’s built in hard drive.
Apple are about to launch a way of buying music videos from the iTunes store, along with a video iPod to load them onto. Apple’s run by Steve Jobs who’s other gig is running Pixar. He’s a Hollywood power player and ,when he puts his movies online, the establishment are going to follow as quickly as they can.
Importantly neither Microsoft or Apple have ever made a dime selling discs. They make money from data and the tools to manipulate it. They understand that discs were just a convenient vehicle for bits when going online meant dialing-up and, as far as they’re concerned, when the movie industry finishes the process the music industry began five years ago, they’ll own it.
I’m nearly at the end of my third post on this subject and I haven’t said much about porn – don’t panic. The porn industry can lead the way to the next stage and I believe it will.
Unlike Hollywood, the Sticky Valley isn’t tied down by lobbying cardboard manufacturers and ancient CEO’s who are still upset that VHS tapes don’t spontaneously melt down after three plays.
Porn is bought by consumers on the cutting edge and already comprises a huge portion of the material traded on file-sharing networks. To make an enormous sum easily, pornographers only have to work out a way of offering users all the benefits of peer-to-peer distribution, with simplicity, guarantees, great prices and minus annoying, pointless DRM.
When they do selling DVD’s is going to look at best quaint and at worst stupid. It will mean more profit, higher sales and totally new markets. (The plan is for SugarBank, and you, to be a big part of that.)
'Progress' means we'll be able to do less with HD-DVDs than we can with the discs we buy today.
August 17th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 19th, 2007
When I buy a movie I want to be able to watch it on my TV at home with Angelina, my notebook on the plane with Eliza, in Cate’s car, on my video iPod and on Gisele’s phone.
In part 1 of this series I explored the real motivation behind the design of the next generation high definition DVD formats. It was a horrifying look at capitalism run amok. (To the barricades!) In this installment I’ll outline what consumers actually want and how Blu-ray and HD-DVD fall short.
This table shows how the current and next generation DVD technology’s stack up from a consumer’s perspective:
The table makes three things obvious:
Key ‘features’ which have made DVD’s popular – copying discs and the ability to play discs from overseas (a very big deal outside the US where studios often try to force consumers to wait for content which has been available for months, or years, in the states) – are the result of ‘hacks’ that the movie industry would like to kill and they’ve made more difficult in the new formats.
The new formats don’t add any new consumer friendly features. All the R&D energy has gone into better security.
Official looking tables make any old crap more plausible.
The new formats have been designed to be the product the movie industry wants – expensive, impossible to copy and based on discs useless outside the country they were bought in. Precisely what consumers don’t want.
When I buy a CD today I make a perfect copy which I store to a hard drive on my desk and use that copy to make a compressed copy I can carry around in my iPod. The physical CD then goes into its box forever (I don’t buy my music online because it’s crippled by DRM and the sound quality’s too low to invest thousands of dollars in).
People want to do the same thing with their movies.
When I buy a movie I want to be able to watch it on my TV at home with Angelina, my notebook on the plane with Eliza, in Cate’s car, on my video iPod and on Gisele’s phone. If I buy a copy of a TV show (The History channel’s – “The Best of Hitler” box set for example) I want to be able to have copies of it everywhere so I can catch a show whenever I have 40 minutes/gypsies/retards to kill. I want to be able to access my video and play it back on any device, wherever I am.
Everything I’ve described consumers see as fair-use and the movie industry sees either as theft or the chance to make an extra buck. They have an understanding of technology I can only compare to Paris Hilton’s understanding of thermodynamics, and are stupid enough to think they can force people to buy multiple copies of the same disc by limiting what you can do with one. They’ve completely misunderstood that DVD’s are just ways of delivering bits. Once we’ve bought the bits we should be able to treat them like people we’ve kidnapped, moving them around however we choose to.
Ironically (and unwittingly), the movie industry needs the people they are continually trying to prosecute to hack their new formats into a product worth having. Without the ability to easily copy and transfer movies, these over-priced, under-featured formats are going to die even more quickly than I predict (which is – within five years they’ll be irrelevant to people under 30).
The other problem with the new formats is they’re fixed.
Any new DVD will need a new player which is designed to a specification whish has to stay fixed. As new technology comes along (better sound, 3D, higher resolution) the format will become obsolete and has to be replaced. That’s not a huge problem until you realize that the 1080p HD they’re designed for is a transitional format.
Color TV lasted essentially unchanged for nearly 70 years (everyone just got better looking), VHS lasted 30 and DVD will last about 10. Sony’s ‘new’ Blu-ray discs were designed in 1995 and are a decade old before any of us own them. The movie industry produces films at four times HD resolution and is gearing up for 3D. In a digital culture any of these advances could be delivered over the web and decoded with a change in software as soon as they’re available. Unless, of course, you get your movies on testicle sized slabs of plastic and feed them into a DVD player which you can’t upgrade.
According to the fantasy logic of the movie industry, when they decide we’re ready to upgrade, we’ll go out and buy another bunch of dumb machines and discs to go with them (and they’ll get paid for their back catalogues once more, which will never go into the public domain because they fight constantly to increase the length of copyrights).
I don’t buy it, and it makes me want to bang my head against my keyboard lfjhdflktybkjhsdfiygqejhrkv – that’s better.
The answer is not better DVD’s, it’s a better way to deliver bits and that’s the internet. People want cheap, legal, convenient downloading because it’ll give them total flexibility and deliver content cheaper and faster than any disc. They’re going to get it and in the final installment I’ll explain how I think it’ll happen.
This video, for the song “A Million Ways” (which I found via Signals vs. Noise – which is a great blog, but which I read so you don’t have to) is the perfect example. I’ve watched it a few times and I don’t even like the song.
No budget, no special effects, a single camera on a tripod, natural light and yet – better than any video I can remember seeing in months. If you can make something as compelling, fun and interesting as this – which also makes my ham happy, you’re being very smart and you should let me know about it. All you need is a video camera and an idea (okay – and hot naked people). There’s no excuse for dull smut people.
DVDs are at deaths door. One problem with the format is it's desire to please manufacturers more than customers.
August 15th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 19th, 2007
Making predictions about the future is an easy way to give yourself something to be embarrassed about later in life. For example, when I was a kid they told us that we’d consume all our nutrition via colored pills and that some of us would be working on the moon by now. I am writing this from my privately funded lunar base, but still get pissed about the pill food every time I think about it.
The only way to make a prediction that’s not going to embarrass you, is to look at what’s already happening and extrapolate into the future a short distance. E.g – “Honey, I’m about to get you very messy”. I have done this (it ended up mostly in her hair), consulted my crystal balls and seen the future.
The adult DVD industry is about to stop producing DVDs in bulk. The next generation HD formats, Blu-ray from Sony and HD-DVD from Toshiba are mostly irrelevant months before they’ve been properly launched. The DVD market will not get bigger thanks to the new formats and it’s time to hold the old distribution channel’s hand, sing ‘Dust in the Wind’ and flip the switch on its respirator. The adult market is going to take the lead (again) in showing Hollywood the future of home entertainment.
If you trust me you can stop reading here. I appreciate it. If you insist on a fuller explanation, here it is.
The DVD format was finalized when most people thought the world wide web was a Spiderman convention, and uses MPEG-2 compression. You don’t need to know anything about MPEG-2 apart from the fact that it’s old. You can’t fit an HD movie on a DVD using MPEG-2, but you can using more recent compression technology. Problem is, no-one wants to do it. Hollywood and the electronics companies (who own most of Hollywood) don’t want to sell us enhanced DVD’s, they want a totally new format.
…a new format gives electronics companies a chance to own a chunk of the patents behind it, and therefore to collect royalties on every new player sold.
The studios want a new DVD format so they can go on doing business the way they always have, repackaging the same crap we bought on VHS, Laserdisc and DVD, sleeping with actresses and making Steven Segal movies. As far at they’re concerned, a new format is a chance to sell us all six Star Wars movies again (a box set I’d only buy if extra’s include a commentary track where you can hear George Lucas screaming as I give him a series of increasingly powerful electric shocks every time anything on screen upsets me).
The studios also foolishly believe they can stop people from copying the new DVD formats because:
A – they don’t understand DRM doesn’t/can’t work and that, even if it did, who needs to crack encryption when the picture quality of an HD DVD is high enough to make an analogue copy perfectly watchable.
B – they could be convinced to pimp their own relatives if you supported your argument with some really dynamic PowerPoint.
The electronics companies want a new format because they think it can bring their profits back. They once made billions selling DVD players. Now, DVD technology’s cheaper than VHS ever was, and everyone who wants a DVD player has already bought one.
Even better for them, a new format gives electronics companies a chance to own a chunk of the patents behind it, and therefore to collect royalties on every new player sold. Collecting royalties for doing nothing is vastly more profitable than building and selling boxes (I know this because I’m a direct descendant of the man who patented the cheese grater in 1654. I get a check every time any grater is sold anywhere on the planet and I’ve used that money to fund my moon-base.)
The greed to be part of the ‘patent-pool’ is also why there are two competing next-generation formats on the horizon. The technology companies have split into two groups because, if they all worked together, they’d each have a smaller piece of the patent-pool pie. (If any of this sounds pointless and dumb you’re understanding the situation perfectly.)
So that’s why we’re going to get a new DVD format. The industry wants to make a bigger profit, and will give us slightly improved technology if that’s what it takes to make us buy it. The only challenge in producing HD-DVD for them is working out ways to make it expensive enough to turn on their accountants. Satisfying consumers is the cover being used to persuade us to buy technology that satisfies their profit projections.
Being driven by greed not consumer need is a really bad way to launch a format (Minidisc? Digital Compact Cassette? Memory Stick? Anyone?) In the next part of this series I’ll explain why, aside from its rickety foundations, the next generation of DVD technology is destined to be far less important than DVD was a decade ago.
Nothing in marketing works as well as a decent joke.
August 9th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: May 2nd, 2009
He knows what sofas like.
Homemade Sex Toys is a site which reads like the result of a drunk, late-night conversation between Mcgyver and R Kelly. It provides instructions on how to turn ordinary household objects into a harem of inanimate whores.
Flipping through it made me think three things:
This is brilliant marketing with enormous viral potential
Someone needs to start the ‘Homemade Sex Toys’ section at SugarHive immediately
Sex is easier to sell when coupled to humor
The third point is the one that really stopped me.
In a market dominated by companies trying to out ‘hard-core’ each other, can you imagine how refreshing a sexy website/movie would be which managed to make you laugh? Why does that combination work so well? Looking a the words make it suddenly obvious.
Funny + Useful appeals. So does Beautiful + Useful. How about Shocking + Useful? Gross + Useful? Not so hot I think, yet ironically, where much of the market’s heading.
If the ‘usefulness’ of a sex product is its sexuality (assuming the use is masturbation) what are you tying ‘useful’ too in order to sell your product? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you’ve not looked hard enough. If you do, would anything else work better? What’s your funny?
Why conversion rates mean selling content is more cost effective than being an affiliate.
July 11th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 18th, 2007
Your audience sits here.
I’m getting a lot of questions about launching porn websites from people who don’t know where to start. The answer is a content based pay-site. I’ll explain why.
Adult websites can be broadly divided into two camps.
Push-me websites don’t produce content. They are where you’re used to finding ‘free’ porn.They specialize in telling people where they can find adult material by linking to free samples. They make their money by selling advertising, and are normally paid a chunk of the subscription fees their surfers generate via an ‘affiliate program’.
Pull-you websites produce content (e.g. Playboy.com). They’re the sites that ask you for money. They make their money by selling subscriptions and they normally share a portion of their income with affiliates who run Push-me websites.
The biggest sites, in terms of numbers of visitors, are Push-me. A really big one, like Sublime Directory, can see 200-300,000 visitors an hour. Technically speaking that’s a fucking ton of people (and puts Sublime Directory among the top 2,000 websites worldwide – a large Pull-you website would be lucky to see than many visitors in a day.)
Push-me seems easy. No content to produce, you just throw up some links and get paid by other people who do the hard work of producing photos and movies, it’s obvious right?
Obvious but wrong. Despite the hassles of maintaining a subscription website, 2257 record keeping and hiring models (or modeling), Pull-you is where the money is. It’s all about conversion.
Conversion rates, normally expressed per thousand visitors, determine how many people seeing a webpage do what the page designer wants them to. I.e. click on a link, provide their email address or subscribe to a website.
Therefore, a website that ‘converts’ at a rate of two-per-thousand selling subscriptions, will on average sell two subscriptions to each thousand visitors that arrive.
If you run a Push-me website you have to convert customers three times:
Once to get them from wherever they are to your site
A second time to get them from your site to one of the websites you’re advertising
A third time on the website they visit (because if they don’t spend money there, you won’t get paid as an affiliate)
That explains why Push-me sites need such vast quantities of visitors.
Assuming a conversion rate of 10 per thousand (which is high), if a site receives 100,000 visitors, 1,000 of those people will click links on their site (conversion two above) and 10 of those people will actually make a purchase on the site they visit (conversion three).
Assuming the site owner is paid $40 for each sale, they’ll make $400 out of the 100,000 visitors that they started with.
The catch is, in order to get that 100,000 visitors, they will have had to advertise to 1,000,000 people, assuming a conversion rate of 10 per thousand in response to their ads.
Getting that volume of visitors (’traffic’ as webmasters refer to it) requires skill if you don’t have the number one spot at Google, or the money to buy a lot of advertising. Even if you have the money to buy ads, once you spend more than $400 you’re running at a loss.
Those facts are why it’s almost impossible to successfully run a small Push-me website which relies on advertising revenue.
If you run a Pull-you website in the same environment what happens?
Firstly, you only need two conversions:
Once to get people to visit your website
A second time to get them to make a purchase
As before, 100,000 visitors converting at a rate of 10 per thousand gives you 1,000 conversions, but this time each conversion is a sale. At a value of $40 each, you’ve got $40,000 in the bank for exactly the same amount of incoming traffic as before.
That’s $40,000 (Pull-you with content) instead of $400 (Push-me to content). You’re a hundred times (a couple of orders of magnitude) ahead financially as a content producer.
Even factoring in $10,000 in production expenses, and another $10,000 in advertising costs (to put your site in front of a million people to get your initial 100,000 visitors) the numbers aren’t even close.
That’s why it’s crazy to launch a Push-me site, unless you have access to vast quantities of high-quality, low cost traffic. All other thing being equal, a Pull-you site produces the same rewards as a Push-me site with 1% of the traffic (all other things being equal).
If you’re thinking of starting a site, I hope that makes your decision a little easier. Content is king.
July 5th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 18th, 2007
Write your own caption.
For years I’ve been telling people who’ve asked me to help with their website to pay me generously for my time. After that, I’d say ‘Make it work like the front page of a newspaper’. At this point we’d often have random conversations about black and white photographs and layout that quickly degenerated into fist-fights. I’d normally win. What I was trying to say back then, without having words for what hadn’t been invented, was build a blog.
Traditionally adult websites have tried to entice people to pay for their content using ‘tours’. Tour is a very elegant word to use for an experience akin to being wheeled through a red-light district, with your eyes wired open, while being shouted at by angry pimps.
There’s a lot of mysticism about tours and some designers have built reputations for being able to produce magical pages which enable the profitable sale of almost anything. This bullshit has made designing ugly web-pages a very lucrative business for some. In return they’ve worked hard to promote the idea among adult webmasters that the ‘right’ tour can make or break a website.
Tour designers treat Photoshop with less kindness than cops arresting a drunk guy in a NAMBLA sweatshirt, interrupting a PTA meeting by shouting "Where the kids at?".
Tour designers treat Photoshop with less kindness than cops arresting a drunk guy in a NAMBLA sweatshirt, interrupting a PTA meeting by shouting "Where the kids at?". Tours are what most people think of when they imagine an adult website and, in 2005, they’re, almost universally, an ugly cliche. As they’re often produced at great expense, they tend to be used for years at a time without significant changes.
The free-side of an adult website (the part you can see without paying for a membership) has four purposes:
Get people’s attention
Preview what’s in the website.
Give an idea of the size and scope of the website
Provide an easy way to join the website
If I was launching a subscription adult website today I’d write a blog instead of building a tour. I’m not talking about blogvertising, I’m talking about replacing tours/ads with blogs entirely.
While a tour is an advertisement people endure, a blog is content that people seek out. No one reads an ad for thirty minutes, but many people will spend that much time at a good blog, and the ones who do will tell their friends.
A blog can do everything a tour’s supposed to, better than
any tour ever could. They can also do a number of things a tour can’t.
Using RSS visitors can subscribe to a blog feed and stay informed of what’s happening at your website without giving up their privacy.
The text in a blog naturally provides search engines with thousands or relevant phrases which drives people to your website.
Over time, the blog will becomes a detailed, public, searchable, index of the website it’s connected to.
Positive comments from paying members provide a constantly updated source of user testimonials.
If you were paying me as a consultant I’d tell you this:
If you’re running a website but don’t have a blog get one.
If you have a blog but still run a tour, make it easy to sign-up from the blog and kill the tour.
If you’re about to build a website start with the blog and base everything on that.
The web is a written medium, ergo what works for print, works online too.
June 18th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 18th, 2007
Book editors tell writers, “Show, don’t tell.” I’m sure even Stephen King’s heard it, along with “Stop writing. I mean it Stephen – step away from the pen.” It’s a way of reminding people that talking about stuff is less interesting than doing stuff. It’s why letters to adult mags are written as if incestuous lesbian twins have actually moved in next door, instead of just imagining how great it would be if they did. Most websites need to take this advice.
Think about it. Incestuous lesbian twins next door would be pretty damn sweet.
Adult websites have a huge advantage over other online sellers, because their product can be shown on the web without compromise – you can see exactly what you’re paying for. When I go to Amazon to buy a new vibrator, I can’t tell from the picture if the model I’m browsing will, like the last three, vibrate my balls hard enough to make me ejaculate a milky foam. When I go to eBay looking for a gently used 4″ CyberSkin Penis Extension (because 20’s a round number ladies), I have no way of knowing exactly how well it will fit.
Keep your samples current and limit the number of the samples instead of their quality (when you go for a test drive they don’t put you in a car that only drives at 30 mph).
Most people who run adult websites start by copying other websites they know and like. This is smart, “Talent borrows, genius steals.” Unfortunately most copying is done without thinking. This is dumb, and it’s why most adult websites don’t make the money they should.
The core of the problem is that ten years ago when the Internet was young, Internet Explorer was at version 1.0 and AOL was overpriced shit (some things don’t change), a primitive pornographer made a faulty assumption. It was:
“People love reading descriptions.”
That mistake’s done more to damage the profitability of the adult internet than any other. Expecting a horny porn buyer to read sales copy is unrealistic. Even when copy has its place, testimonials and marketing talk only work if you trust the person telling them to you. Why should a stranger on the internet trust you?
If you’re trying to sell a car online it makes sense to try and convey a sense of the fine Corinthian leather interior through words. If you’re trying to sell access to photos, shut up and just show people what you have to sell.
Amazon realized this a long time ago. Though their products can’t be fully experienced online they don’t waste a single word on their product pages telling you to buy. Being ’salesy’ is the hallmark of an amateur. Don’t tell, show.
The easiest way to make people pay for your product is to give it to them without obligation and let them decide if they like it.
Car dealerships knows this – that’s why they offer test drives.
Supermarkets knows this – that’s why they give out samples.
Record stores knows this – that’s why they let you listen to their CDs.
Your website should be a machine that delivers up-to-date, high quality, free samples to the people who visit it.
Keep your samples current and limit the number of the samples instead of their quality (when you go for a test drive they don’t put you in a car that only drives at 30 mph). If you’re giving away sample pictures don’t limit their size or deface them with obscuring graphics. Same goes for video.
Every time you limit the quality of your samples, or add a condition to
them being seen, you give a potential buyer a decision to make – do
they trust you that the real products better than the stuff you’re
giving away. Don’t do it
Let your content do the talking for you and then let people decide if they want to pay for more.
Of course, if your content is saying “I am a crappy waste of time” – change it.
June 14th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 17th, 2007
Your ad/face/website here.
In the 3 weeks since this blog launched over 20,000 people have stopped by to say hello. Currently about 3,000 people a day are visiting. A lot of them want to see original pictures of hot naked people and I want to help. Taking my clothes off was an option, but the average monitor’s 17 inches. Getting my baby-leg to fit on a screen that size involves more compression than I’m comfortable with. I need your help.
If you have a website, if you’re a nude model, or if you want to be, send me an email and get promoted via SugarBank. In return for a few exclusive pictures I’ll feature you here and send thousands of horny wankers (that’s a technical marketing term for well-qualified sales prospects) to you.
Build a page, stick a link to SugarBank on it somewhere and email it to me or just email images if you prefer. Video’s cool too.
Stuff that makes me say “Hey, that’s sexy” is preferred to stuff that makes me say ‘What is that? Jesus… oh my GOD. NO!!… SWITCH IT OFF!” Guaranteed inclusion for any pictures which include references to SugarBank. Submissions from exhibitionists who’ve never modeled before welcomed and treated kindly. No pop-ups please.
For strictly educational purposes we explore the the worst of adult industry PR.
June 1st, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 17th, 2007
Flame on…
The sex industry has a crappy reputation and gets appalling press. A lot of that’s due to prejudice and misrepresentation. The rest is due to stupidity.
Misrepresentation we can’t do anything about. Stupidity we can. Here are ten things to avoid is you want to get better publicity, more often.
(Flame on)
Don’t endanger performers: The BDSM community handles people’s wildly different sexual fetishes, without being judgmental, by saying anything’s okay if it’s safe, sane and consensual:
Safe = People shouldn’t put others at risk
Sane = People shouldn’t put themselves at risk due to stupidity or naivete
Consensual = Everyone involved has to agree to everything they’re involved in
Consent alone isn’t enough. Consenting to some things doesn’t mean consenting to anything. I consented to seeing ‘Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace’ back in 1999. Sure I knew it was going to have some kids stuff in it, but I didn’t know how bad a movie could be back then – I was young. No one told me about Jar Jar Binks.
In every other branch of the entertainment industry, what appears to be dangerous is simulated. The adult industry has to start doing the same.
Where’s porn’s Alias? Die Hard? Stanford and Son? (actually I think I saw a porn take on Stanford and Son once, it wasn’t pretty).
Don’t lie: I recently read a piece in which a well known adult performer discussed being too busy to follow through on the mainstream movie offers that land on her doorstep, every week apparently.
Bullshit.
To expect people to believe than a porn actress turned down a speaking role in a (real) movie, so they could film spend the day in a warehouse in San Fernando shooting ‘Put It All In There Right Now – 14′, is ridiculous.
If good offers of real parts existed they’d be going to Jenna Jameson and she’d take one occasionally. The roles adult performers get offered are cameos as porn stars and strippers. They pay $250 for the day and you have to date the director. I know – I used to get the calls.
Don’t lie. Didn’t Mr. T teach you anything?
Don’t steal: If you’re going to advertise that your website’s free, and say you need a credit card to authenticate age, and you later charge people who’ve signed on for a free trial for a membership, you are a liar and a thief.
It’s the seller’s responsibility to make things clear, not the customers job to analyze the fine print.
The enduring popularity of ‘fine-print scams’ are the reason people begin think that browsing adult websites is a leading cause of cancer.
Anything that damages customers trust costs you, and everyone else, money.
Don’t copy (as much): The world’s not out of ideas but the adult world can seem as if it is.
Sex is at the center of porn in the same way that violence is at the center of ‘action’ movies. It provides space for limitless variation. Where’s porn’s Alias? Die Hard? Stanford and Son? (actually I think I saw a porn take on Stanford and Son once, it wasn’t pretty).
Do something new, people want to be entertained and the things being copied were new ideas once. Get some.
Don’t pretend it’s real: Reality porn is now less convincing than the pizza-delivery scenario so well-loved in the seventies and eighties. What’s the point of labeling things ‘reality’ when everything’s been staged? How does that differ from badly acted drama?
If you want to shoot reality work out a way to do it that works. Stop pretending that you’re picking people up people too stupid to ask why the guy who’s talking to them goes by the name ‘MILF Assassin’ and is holding a camcorder.
Don’t call women sluts and whores: The current popularity in the porn industry for calling female performers sluts, whores and tramps is as misguided as rappers calling each other nigger. (Don’t believe me? Think that ‘nigga’s’ okay now? Shout it at some black people and see if anyone’s offended. I don’t care who you are. If Justin Timberlake called Snoop nigger, Snoop would fuck him up.)
There’s nothing empowering about encouraging people who think you’re worthless, to refer to you as if you are.
Verbal degradation is a particular fetish some people share and many don’t. When did the industry decide that most of us were into it?
Don’t become obsessed with sodomy: Women have entirely different genitals from men. That’s good. The vagina is the perfect reproductive and sexual organ – why trade it for an orifice women share with your grandfather.
I’m not homophobe but if I want to watch a close-up or a penis entering an asshole I’ll watch gay porn – ‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’ or something.
At one time wasn’t an emphasis on sodomy the difference between straight and gay porn anyway?
Don’t piss on people: Penthouse famously led us down this golden pathway, ostensibly satisfying a fetish of Bob Guccione (Bob if that’s not true – apologies).
It’s not that peeing is horrifying or even particularly gross (though drinking it’s a bit odd). It’s just why? When I see a beautiful women in a bar I don’t think ‘Hmmm, she’d look great with her mouth full of my lemonade’ – I’m not R Kelly.
Taking a pee is not a sexy event for most people.
Don’t pretend you’re a pimp: You know who you are webmasters.
You spend your life in front of a keyboard. As a teenager dates were a problem. The most attractive woman you know pays you to run her website. You like Linux. You go online to play computer games with other chubby men. You have never been arrested. Any competent tarmac technician could, and would, kick your ass. You’re white. You are not a pimp. Shut up about it.
Don’t court bad publicity: The two groups of people who say ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity’ are idiots and incompetent publicists (these groups crossover). Don’t believe it and remember that you can say no occasionally.
If you’re unsure what bad publicity might be, think about anything that gets you attention without making you money or more popular.
Don’t defend everything: The adult industry won’t succeed in protecting its right to free speech by trying to force the public to accept whatever the most degenerate people in the industry can think up. Even the NRA distance themselves from people who use guns to shoot people at random from their car.
When people are hurt the free-speech argument is superseded, in the same way it is when a protest against a minority group devolves into a physical attack.
Some things, like the fifth season of the West Wing, aren’t worth defending. Let them rot.
Choosing your porn name is too important to leave to the street you grew up on and the name of your pet.
May 30th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 17th, 2007
If you want people to look you in the eyse without laughing, consider your porn name carefully.
We’ve all heard about making up a porn name by combining our pet’s name with the street we grew up on but since 1986 that’s been illegal. Seriously, try it and porn commandos will bury up to the neck in sand and bukkake on you until you apologize.
A professional name is a serious thing. You have to live with it, it’s your calling card and it has to grow as you do. It’s also the first major decision you make on entering the industry, and shouldn’t be made when confronted with a release form in a photographers studio. If you leave it until then you’ll end up with a name the photographer came up with. You don’t want that, get any jizz bizz professional drunk enough and they’ll rattle off a list of ridiculous porn names they’d love to saddle someone with.
Even if you leave the adult world, think how much easier it’ll be to discuss your ‘lost’ past and religious conversion if you don’t have to refer to your former self as ‘Goldie Cumfish’.
A number of European performers use their real names, though it’s rare in the US (a dissertation on guilt and morality is waiting to be written on that). The problems with using your real name are:
It may not be memorable.
You probably won’t be able to buy it as a URL for your website.
You won’t be able to check into a hotel without getting calls from horny fans who know you’re in town.
If you have children they’re going to have to justify your lifestyle every day in school. Of course, if you home school your kids and work in the adult industry, your kids are social outcasts already. Go back to worrying about Arab homosexuals with AIDS being paid, with your tax dollars, to take our guns away and force us all to be Buddhists.
Like everyone else in the public eye, including William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton (so named because he’ll drop trou’ for a dollar), you also want a porn name to create an impression.
Newcomers frequently try to choose names that sound similar to other performers they admire. That’s a mistake.
The more successful you become, the shorter your name will become. We naturally shorten names because we like the people we’re referring to. It feels friendly and the public’s reliable ability to sniff out killers and pederasts before they’ve done anything obviously wrong is why Michael Jackson, even at the height of his fame, was never just Michael, why O.J Simpson never lost the Simpson, and why Jack the Ripper was never simply Rip.
If I say Jennifer, Brad or Angelina you’ll think of specific individuals (naked, a messy pile of limbs, oil everywhere – or is that just me?). If your chosen name is shared with someone more famous than you it’s a certainty that you’ll be mistaken for them in print. In the porn industry any names which include: Ron, Jenna, Danni, Tera, Nina, Seka, Aria, Veronika (and many, many more) are going to be an uphill battle.
Some amateur website owners try to solve the problem of having a non-unique name, and a decent URL, by tying a description of what they like to do the name they want. It’s where we got ExtremeHolly.com (she’s extreme) and NaughtyAlysha.com (a very naughty lady) from.
NB: If you’re going to visit either of those URLs remember there are some things you can’t un-see.
The problem with descriptive names is that they can be restrictive and give the impression you’re a one trick pony. Flexible names are as desirable as flexible dates.
Unless you’re looking for legal bills don’t choose anything that includes a trademarked phrase. That means you Dr. Whopper (catchphrase – Extra mayo? UARRRGH!)
Most importantly, choose your name before your first professional engagement and choose carefully. Some directors refuse to put ‘cheesy’ names on their boxes and I know models who are called different things according to where they appear because of that. Name changes are a marketing nightmare.
Don’t tell anyone your professional name until you’ve bought a URL, and perhaps started a trademark application. Otherwise when you try to buy that domain you might discover someone else is pretending to be you. Unfortunately it still happens a lot.
Personally, I love names with a touch of retro humor. Beverly Center, Dana Point, Jerry Curl and Bill O’Goods are all high on my list of too-good-not-to-be-used porn names. Which is why I’ll never venture in front of the camera (besides, until wide angle lens technology catches up with my size I’m doomed to appearing blurry.)
The key to picking a great professional name for the adult industry is to forget you’re in the adult industry at all. The best-known nude models and performers have names that would work just as well if they were fronting a rock band or acting in mainstream movies. Your name shouldn’t be something you might ever be ashamed of – you’ll have enough prejudice to counter if you become successful.
Even if you leave the adult world, think how much easier it’ll be to discuss your ‘lost’ past and religious conversion if you don’t have to refer to your former self as ‘Goldie Cumfish’.
Pick something that sounds cool and is non-porn specific. By the time people see your website they’ll be aware of what you’re involved in. If your name sounds ‘porny’ it’ll only make you seem cheesy and out of date.
RSS is useful, free and totally anonymous. Why aren't more adult sites using it?
May 29th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 17th, 2007
Kiss my ass. He wants to kiss you too.
“During a brief orbit of planet smut today, I noticed that, despite being well stocked with ass, the adult world hasn’t caught on to RSS yet.”
(Rimshot. The crowd claps politely)
“Thanks folks but seriously…”
RSS allows you to provide updates of what’s going on at your website, without having to ask for an email address. No one feels good about giving their email to an adult site. RSS makes collecting email addresses redundant.
A year ago RSS was the future, now it’s here and tomorrow you’ll look a little silly for not offering an RSS feed. The more often you update, the more sense RSS makes, and RSS works for any content which changes frequently.
Since I started using an RSS reader, the number of sites I visit regularly that don’t offer RSS has dropped almost to zero. I know I’m not alone and adult websites update all the time. Why isn’t RSS everywhere? It’s free.
Now back to the show.
“FLY ME!… to the moon… Thanks you’re wonderful… Shoot me to the stars…”
How smart advertisers are using blogs to talking with people instead of shouting at them.
May 26th, 2005 by Sam Sugar | Last modified: June 15th, 2007
Paedophiles love Coca-Cola. Thanks for the warning.
Gapingvoid.com, is not pornographic but sounds as if it should be, and has some pithy thoughts on blogvertising.
Despite being a made up word, and most of them taste like a mouthful of menthols, vinegar and cork to me, blogvertising has some value. Traditional advertising is dead (Email, Web and I did it. We were drunk, things got out of hand) and advertising is going through a process of valmorification.
Most adult websites are stuck in the seventies, hiding content behind tours that look like discos designed by men in floppy shirts for couples on roller-skates.
Tours are ads, and anyone born after 1950 doesn’t believe anything said by ads, the government or people born before 1950.
Samples are cool but they don’t make a tour into something else. What impresses customers is a story – a puffed-up testimonial, built on a story that sounds true told by someone you trust.
Tours don’t provide stories or dialogue. They ask you for money. LIKE THIS!!!! They’re a scary porn cliche. Does anything say “Thanks for the creditcard info, now I’m going to rob you” like a flash-laden tour?
There is a better way. Kill the ads/tours, highlight the samples and LEAVE THE SHOUTING TO OWEN MEANY. Blogs are personal and conversational which is why even corporate blogs have more character than traditional websites.
You don’t need a blog in order to learn from them. People visit blogs because they like what they see. Tours are ads you try to force viewers to read against their better judgment. People like porn and seek it out. Advertising is exactly what’s not needed.
Entertain, amuse and talk to your visitors and forget about selling to them. No one needs to be told to ‘click here’ more than once if your site’s well designed, or ‘buy now’ if they want what you have to sell. Dialogue is foreplay and ads are getting felt up by someone shouting “Where’s your money?”
Like the punchline says – be the bull that walks down the hill and fucks all the cows. (Amazingly – my uncle was actually teaching me something when he told that joke.)
If the people you’re talking to like you they’ll trust you, and might believe you and when you tell them something’s worth doing, buying or checking out.
AJ "good article, but it isn’t an AIDs outbreak (or an AIDS outbreak, if you want to capitalize it properly) – it’s an HIV outbreak. an individual can be HIV+ for...…" on Porn’s 2009 AIDs Outbreak [more]
heath fuller "I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.…" on Sugasm #127 [more]
Gary Burchner "I LOVE porn. I LOVE “bareback” sex. However, there’s no such thing as “safe sex”. Deep kissing, finger fucking, and all the obvious acts...…" on Porn’s 2009 AIDs Outbreak [more]
Suddenly, those 10% increases look pretty good. In fact, the last step shown represents a jump as large as the first 25 steps combined.
